Elfin
by Bone White Butterfly
Summary: Severus Snape must retrieve a mysterious student who was somehow accepted at midterm—or face the wrath of a homicidal castle. Enter a Malfoy House Elf undergone a growth spurt who’s been told wizards want to grind him into Potions ingredients...
1. Prologue

_Elfin  
__Bone White Butterfly_

"**Hmm, slavery is illegal, so I can't own Harry Potter. No one can. …yah hear that, Rowling!"**

_

* * *

_

House Elves are, as a race, perfectly meek, obedient, and devoted. Except for one night a year.

Call it Elf P.M.S. Synchronized, every bloody Elf at once P.M.S.

Let me make this clear. If you—ever—see a House Elf on October 31st, All Hallows Eve, back away slowly and pray that he didn't see you to at least ten gods. Screw monotheism; your life is at stake here.

Fortunately for humans, the biggest Wizard holiday of the year is Halloween, and it is anathema for a House Elf to be seen. Instead, enchanted gloves careen about for days, readying the party scene. Not a house Elf to be found. So the humans, having no clue about their servants' little secret, remain safe.

x-x-x

_But this tale isn't about anyone being safe._

_This tale is not about House Elves at all but another kind entirely.  
Despite what you may think, there is very little humor in the story I am about to tell you._

_But there is a party in it._

_A Hallows Eve Ball._

_A small boy's world is about to be shattered along with an ancient secret.  
And the Witching Hour has only just begun—_

* * *

**Note: if anybody's finished a fic they like, point me at it. Luv, y'all. Nite.**


	2. The Gloves

* * *

The household was in a quiet uproar. The hostess's gloves for her costume had somehow been mislaid, and the fête had already begun. It was trivial, really—from an outsider's perspective. But to someone whose entire world was that manor, it amounted to a national disaster. And, of all nights, it just had to be Halloween.

Hurriedly, the gloves were located rammed between the mattresses of a bed in a locked guest room that hadn't been used for ten years. That was the easy part. The headache came when they tried to think of a way to get the gloves into the ballroom where the partygoers mingled. The phantom serving hands were too stupid to follow complex orders, and for a House Elf to set foot in the place was unthinkable, especially tonight—night of all nights. All seemed lost.

Then, an epiphany.

Elfin children look a lot like humans. A lot of them were currently on hand, just a mile down the road at the old abandoned castle. And children are incredibly easy to coerce.

XXX

Which is how Fen came to be standing in the great room, wringing the lady's gloves in his hands: House Elves being at _that_ time of the year and his damnable childhood. Now he was standing there in the sheltered alcove, faced with his own "easy part," "just-kill-me-now part" problem. The woman had been very simple to find, despite her unannounced costume change, her secret location, and her being with a man half her age in an—erm, compromising position?

Which brings us to the part where he wanted to die…

He rocked on his feet uneasily as the pair obviously didn't notice he was there. Easy mistake to make—he was rather small and unassuming. Most of his face was hidden under a thick tangle of dark curls. One horrified hazel eye could be seen through the mess as the two steadily lost their inhibitions.

He managed to utter a stuttered cough before his innocence was completely shattered. The pair heard him and disentangled slightly, but they only stopped their horrific spooning session when he stammered, "La-Lady Malfoy?"

Narcissa Malfoy detached from her friend so quickly it took the man a minute to notice she was gone from his arms. Folding her bare hands, she stared down at Fen enquiringly.

'_A tad late to be feigning innocence, Milady,'_ a terribly quiet voice inside of him whispered. On the outside, his face blanched at the thought of actually saying that aloud. He shoved his inner voice down into the pit of his stomach. His courage had fled down there a long time ago; they could keep each other company while he tried to survive this mess. Clamping his mouth shut with willpower, he held out the gloves to the Malfoy woman as he watched the wheels in her head careen madly out of control.

Then the wheels screeched to a halt. She shoved the gloves back into his chest. "Never breathe a word about this to anyone," she ordered, a pointed look in her painted eyes. Fen stared, uncomprehending, and tried again to hand her the gloves. She pointed to the exit through the dark curtain. "Get out, and don't let me see your face again tonight."

"Your gloves," he tried.

"Keep them," she told him. "They're yours. Get out."

Fen's eyes popped open. He understood that. Without another word, he stuffed the long, imbedded crystal gloves into one broad gray sleeve and stepped out through the curtain.

He walked into a swirling world of elegant color, masked faces, and politely worded insults. The usual Malfoy house party. Gracefully weaving through the tangle of adults without thinking, he generally went without being noticed. When an eye did linger on him, he seemed a well-bred wizard boy, just a bit too young to be off at school. He was somewhat uncomfortable wearing an odd costume of gray silk that belonged on an ancient prince, but it did suit him and his unconsciously regal air. Now if only he would tie back those unruly curls, his parents could be proud of him.

He didn't have parents, he would kill himself before tying back his hair, and he was too lost in the train wreck that was his thoughts to realize he was behaving like nobility. If he'd known, he would have jumped off the nearest cliff.

Fortunately, there weren't any cliffs nearby and he wasn't noticing much of anything as he wandered towards the exit.

Behind him, an ethereal masked swan stepped out from behind the same curtain and floated out of the ballroom. Just a moment later, Narcissa Malfoy returned through the same door, a vision in silver and green crystal from her feminine dragon's mask to her slippered feet—except for her hands, which only had her wedding ring. She returned to her husband's side appearing rather miffed beneath her charming hostess exterior. "Nowhere to be found," she muttered behind a smile as Lucius Malfoy wrapped an arm around her waist. Only then did the man in the fox costume exit the curtained alcove.

No one noticed what had happened. Not even Fen, and he had reason to suspect such a maneuver. Perhaps if he had been less preoccupied. Or, perhaps not. Narcissa was a master at keeping her affairs a secret. She was the best. Her only possible competition was her husband Lucius. The two of them made their rounds through the room, adding to the conversations of their guests, gaining favors, and keeping alliances. His gloved hands held her bare ones tenderly. She gazed up into his eyes. They truly were made for each other. It would be a real show to see how innocent and hurt the one would act when the other's unfaithfulness was discovered.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

XXX

As all of this happened, Fen leaned against one wall, becoming part of the scenery. He waited for the Malfoys to call attention for the traditional toast before slipping through the hidden servants' door unnoticed. He bolted it shut behind him and promptly dropped to the floor in a jumble of limbs and a hung head.

"Oh, come now Fen, mingling with the humans couldn'a been that bad," an oh-so-reasonable female voice said. He could hear the raised eyebrow in that sentence. He looked at her through the curtain of his hair out of the corner of his eye. The elfin girl was a vision in blue silk—she seemed perfectly comfortable wearing it too, damn her—and, yes, her eyebrow was in the upright position.

"Yes, it could, Proserpine," he sighed in a not-quite retort. He never spoke back. He pulled the gloves from his sleeve and chucked them at the opposite wall.

Proserpine stared at the little crystals sewn on them that glittered in the dim light. "You were to give Lady Malfoy's gloves to her Ladyship," she said, turning "Ladyship" into a vulgar word. "What went wrong? Didn't you find her Ladyship?"

"I found Lady Malfoy with one of…of her friends," Fen reported glumly. Proserpine guessed what he meant by "friend" and made a disgusted face. He banged his head back into the wall. "The Lady paid me to keep me quiet and…she gave me the gloves."

"Lady Malfoy gave…" Proserpine stumbled backwards and hit a wall herself, the picture of shock. Giving an Elf, any Elf, human clothes was unthinkable. Human were idiots. Free a House Elf by giving her clothes—insult to injury. Give clothes as a present—had they gone completely mad? Bribe an Elf with clothes..."Oh hell," she snarled. She put her head in her hands and began to pace across the servants' hallway. In looks, she was a petite teenage witch, but her worried expression aged her significantly, making her seem more her true age. Proserpine—or Little Imp, as she was usually called—was in her late thirties. Not that it meant much. Her mum was three hundred and thinking about having another kid. She tugged on one of the long, horse-like ears that poked out of her hair as she turned about face yet again. Out of her muttering mouth came a wild train of thoughts that would supposedly solve this mess. None of her ideas sounded too good.

"Proserpine?"

She stopped and looked at Fen. Oh, and she thought she looked worse for the wear. If looks were true, he'd just crawled out of the grave and was about to get shoved back in. The mop of curls fell away from his eyes, and she could see a pleading look in them. _Tell me everything will be all right._ She wished she could. It certainly was the easy way out, but he would hate her when he found she had lied to him. Oh, why did that awful woman have to give Fen gloves to keep him quiet? What had happened to giving money and favors and death threats?

She closed her eyes. Fen was a lot younger than she, little more than a baby. The best trick to get a young one's mind off of something was to distract it with something else. And she'd get her mind off of the gloves by getting Fen's mind off them—if that made any sense.

She shook her head and opened her mouth. "No, no. Fen, you don't worry about it tonight. It's Halloweeny. Time for fun, play, frolic!" She took the gloves and stuffed them under her dress where no one would see, and then picked up Fen. He was such a small Elf. "Down to Party, yes?"

And before he could say a word, she ran him down to the Elfin fête in the dungeon of the abandoned castle a mile down the way.

XXX

From there it was a bit of a task to get three butterbeers in him and then to push him into a frenzied chain dance. Proserpine watched the two elfin women on either side of him keep their grip on his hands and pull him along through the intricate loops. His feet hadn't touched the ground for two minutes.

She shuffled around the side of the Dungeon, avoiding the dancers that whipped around, feet pounding the flagstones to the beat of the frantic music. Elfin songs were fast. They had to be, to fit a whole year's worth in between one sunset and dawn. Halloween was too short.

Unfortunately, she was so preoccupied with keeping an eye on the dancers that she didn't notice the wrinkly House Elf until she'd stepped on him. Personally, she would have preferred to step on a nest of Cornish pixies.

Horrified, she tried stammering an apology, but the House Elf began swearing at her before she could get a word in. Thankfully none of the curses he rattled off were magic, or she'd be dead in some rather uncomfortable ways. Most of the death threats involved him strangling her with the tie he wore around his neck. He kept threatening odd Elves as he shuffled away, forgetting almost immediately what had made him so worked up in the first place.

And that was her proof about human clothes. She found herself touching her costume, glad it was only odds and ends magicked to look like a dress. Elves were not meant to wear clothes. They addled your brain and wasted you away until you curled up and died hundreds of years before you were due.

As Proserpine stared at the mad House Elf, a youth named Hades took this as his chance. With a screech, she found herself dancing with an amorous elfin man. He had a death grip on her arms, and with the other dancers they were so pressed for space it was either get real close or get real trampled. "Bad Elf, bad!" she hissed and he grinned. He twirled her around when she tried kicking, so she got someone else on accident.

Six songs went by before her mother noticed and dragged away young Hades by his ear, much to everyone's amusement and Proserpine's relief. Though he had been kind of cute…

Fen. Lady Malfoy. The gloves. Oh hell!

Proserpine finally managed to make her way to the Chair of Honor, where the oldest of the Elfin sat and watched the rest. The young girl built up her courage before kneeling by a chair arm. He glanced down at her kindly, and she managed to whisper, "Horrible thing has happened, Mista' Odin."

She was offered his long droopy ear, and she murmured into it as he closed his eyes and frowned sadly. Then she was done, and Odin began speaking in her ear. She didn't like what she heard. "Odin thinks Little Fen will face much hardship, given human clothes," he said. "Too young. This, Odin thinks, is to be Little Fen's last Halloweeny. Little Fen must fit hundreds of Halloweenys into one night. You, Little Prose, help Little Fen. Don't tell."

Proserpine was sad and thought about the mad House Elf. "If Fen's here, next Halloweeny," she began.

"Old Odin will sit with Little Fen," Odin finished. She looked up at him gratefully. Then she ran to dance with Fen. She kept him dancing for hours, and when his feet gave out, she sat him down in the best spot, making sure he got the richest cakes and the least diluted Firewhiskey. It was stuff that he shouldn't have deserved for hundreds of years, but whenever someone thought to complain, they looked to Old Odin, who shook his head, and they left it alone. Some of them probably guessed what was going on. Humans thought Elves spoke stupid, but their minds worked just fine. And those who guessed about Fen had minds that worked well enough to keep their mouths shut.

Proserpine kept her eye on the time at all times. Halloween was wasting away. Soon, she grabbed up a bowl of clotted cream, some round berries, and Fen and sat them all down before a storyteller. The man quickly told his audience an ancient elfin epic—after he had a rant about how that mean Mista' Tolkien stole the story and messed everything up. Hairy feet and marrying humans, indeed! Everyone booed appropriately and then yelled for him to get on with it already.

He got on with it. Then he ended it, and Proserpine hauled Fen back onto the dance floor for the best songs that were saved for last.

The House Elves trickled out in small groups as the night wore on closer to dawn. They stayed as long as they could, of course, but they had to get back to their Masters' homes in time to make breakfast—traveling on foot. Everyone left eventually. Even Old Odin had to leave, after a few quick whispers of thanks and advice to the oldest Malfoy House Elf. The Malfoys' servants were the lucky House Elves when it came to parties. They hosted the fêtes in this dungeon near the Malfoy manor most often, so they were able to start celebrating first and stop last. It made up somewhat for the unluck of being the Malfoys' servants.

But even they had to leave eventually.

Proserpine and Fen were soon the only ones left. She knew no one would mind, what with Mista' Odin ordering her to make sure Fen had as much fun as possible. Fen was too young and too giddy drunk on fun (among other things) to really notice. So the two danced in the empty, silent dungeon. One kept the other, smaller one dancing until a short time before dawn. Then Fen tripped and fell, and he didn't bother getting up again. Instead, he fell asleep right there on the flagstones. His keeper for the night was only too glad to collapse down next to him. It was hard work, making somebody happy for so long. She panted, grateful for the cool stone beneath her, and turned to study Fen. She had it in her mind to memorize the way he looked on All Hallows Eve. She'd never get another chance, what with Lady Malfoy giving Fen those gloves. Quietly, she cursed all the Malfoys, down to the last ancestor. Lucky thing the family kept such good track of their lineage or she'd never have managed it.

She turned her eyes on Fen. He was so terribly small. Even his ears. You had to hunt through that hair to find them. She didn't know why he was so tiny. She used to ask the adults when she was younger. They had told her to "run 'long now"—meaning it was a bad reason and they didn't want her to know. Proserpine sighed. She had asked a lot about Fen over the years, and she'd been told to run 'long now plenty. He was such a mystery child. Why was he the only Elf she knew with black hair? Why was he so frightfully timid? Why had he shown up in the Malfoy household twelve years ago?

Fen shivered in his sleep.

She turned and looked at him. He wasn't shaking because he was cold. That was another run along now question. Why did Fen always have nightmares? She was pondering that as her own exhaustion took over. They had been the last ones dancing or even in the Dungeon for an hour; she deserved to be tired. She fell asleep on the stone moments before dawn.

There were no rays of sunshine in the underground place to herald the sun's rise, but the exact moment was easy to tell anyway. All one had to do was watch the sleeping Proserpine. Dawn came, then—bam! All at once, her voluminous blonde hair disappeared into her head, leaving only her eyebrows and lashes. As her dress fell apart into pieces of silk cloth, she began to shrink. Her skin, now a dark fleshy pink, became wrinkled, especially in her face. Her closed eyes bulged, her muscle dwindled away, her joints knobbed, and her bones shrank. This was no neat transfiguration. It was a blessing she was already unconscious. Fortunately, it was soon over, and the little House Elf settled down to sleep in a nest of blue silk, hugging two bejeweled green gloves. Little Fen—or Dobbin, as they usually called him—slept close by.

XXX

_That is the big Elfin secret. Once a year, from sunset to dawn on All Hallows Eve, it happens. House Elves grow, becoming what legend calls "High Elves" and what they just call "Tall." They do so every year—unless they are given human clothes. Then they stay stunted and deformed forever. Which is why any wrinkly, bald House Elf you might see on Halloween night will be so ornery—because he's been given clothes and "freed." He'll never be "Tall" again. _

_Hardly the freedom humans celebrate so much. _

_And it was humans who were responsible for this spell placed on the Elves. But the humans have long forgotten everything about their involvement in the ancient curse. Even the Elves have forgotten most of it._

_But forgetting about it didn't stop poor Little Fen—Dobbin—from getting those gloves. It didn't help his circumstances either. Unlike all other House Elves freed before him, his Mistress had accidentally given him clothes while he was "Tall." His transformation days were over. At the moment, that didn't mean much more than one Hell of a night for him, and one Hell of a hangover when he woke up. Later, he would come to realize how important his being freed on All Hallows Eve would be, but for now he dreamt._

* * *

…**whoa. That turned out odd. That's what happens, I guess, when you pull 4 a.m.-ers 3 nights the same week. Ooh, looky. 4:03 a.m. Gonna stop writing now. Would do more, but a large fly has decided to start buzzing around my head. Hmm, why aren't I tired?**

_**Oh, for reference, this story starts All Hallows Eve of Harry's 3rd year. …really must reread that 3rd book...again. Hmm.**_


	3. Forgotten Nightmare

**(This used to be the second half of the incredibly long chapter two… I was editing what I've written so far and decided to split it up. I hope there won't be any confusion.)

* * *

**

"Most times, when you dream, you don't realize it's a dream. In fact, when you do think you're dreaming, _now _is the time to run away. Well, it's Halloween Night, the mist is rolling through the forest of dead trees, and I can hear the woman screaming in her death throes. I know I'm dreaming. Needless to say I'm running.

"_In the wrong direction._

"Hey, it's my dream. I can do what I want. I can run towards certain doom, and I can talk to myself. La-la-la. …Whoa, wait a second. You think I'm talking some invisible audience? Get real, Fen, it's just you in here. Dream, remember? …You don't believe me? One: I'm you; you don't want to start arguing with yourself. Two: stop and listen to yourself. You're speaking like a human. You _know_ you can't speak human.

"…_Oh._

"Yep. This is kinda like that time you thought you were speaking in French. Then you woke up and it was gibberish.

"_But it was French gibberish._

"Do not argue with yourself, Fen. Hey, where is our younger self anyway?

"_Um, left?_

"No, right.

"_Now _you're_ arguing with yourself, ha!_

"I _really_ need to get a new dream.

"_No argument here."_

A small boy burst through the trees sobbing, and the world shifted. Fen's argument with himself disappeared from his mind; he wouldn't remember having it. He watched the child fall to his knees in the dead leaves as the screaming in the distance suddenly stopped. A little head turned up towards the lack of sound. There was so much hope in his eyes. Fen knew the thought running through his head. The screaming had stopped; didn't that mean it was all right now?

The child picked himself up and began running back the way he came. Fen's eyes flew open. "No!" And he dashed after, tackling the boy. The little one fought as Fen picked him up and clamped a hand over his mouth before he could scream for Momma. "I won't let you see," he whispered to the boy as he ran.

In the right direction. Far, far away.

Part of him knew the hypocrisy of it all. He was carrying himself, trying to run away from his own memories. How could you run from something inside your head? You couldn't.

Hands gripped him even as his younger self disappeared. He shivered as a voice whispered in his ear, "Hello, Fenrir—"

XXX

He woke up screaming. Exhaustion didn't allow him to stay awake panting, though. He only caught a few glimpses of Proserpine—or Impy or Little Imp, now that she was a House Elf again. Whatever he was supposed to call her, he only saw his fellow House Elf through a gap in his dark hair a few moments before he was dreaming again.

This time, it was a safe dream of being tortured by Draco Monster. But halfway through, things came to a grinding halt. Wait—hair? He had seen Impy _through his hair?_ But that was impossible. It was after dawn, everyone was a House Elf again, and House Elves did not have hair!

He woke with a start, and his hands flew immediately to his head.

Hair.

He screamed. He looked down. He still looked like he was wearing clothes. The costume hadn't turned back into silk scarves. He wasn't a House Elf. He was still Tall! This wasn't possible. He had to be dreaming.

He blinked. Oh Hell. When you thought you were dreaming, you weren't. He had to run. He had to—

"Impy!" He ran to her side and started shaking her.

The House Elf woke groggily. "Wha—what is it, Dobbin?" She looked up at him. She shook her head and looked again. Her jaw dropped. She looked between his face and her gnarled hands again and again so fast her head rattled. Finally, she stuttered, "Do—Dobb…Fen!"

He looked at her helplessly. "Impy, help!"

She screamed. She hid under all those blue silk scarves and screamed. That was supposed to be his job! He rifled through the scarves and pulled her out, gripping her shoulders. "Impy," he told her, "You have to help Litt—Dobb—Fen… Oh, just help me!" Then he blinked, shocked. That was the first time he'd ordered anyone to do anything. Impy went stiff as a board and her enormous eyes widened to the size of saucers. He could see his reflection in them. He was Tall. He was Fen. She wasn't moving.

He dropped her, thinking he'd hurt her.

Dazed, she picked herself up off the floor and stared at him quietly. Well, at least it was an improvement over the screaming. So they stared at each other, him kneeling and her standing. They were eye level with each other. If Fen stood, he'd be taller than her. He had never been taller than anybody before. He didn't dare stand. He sat down on his rump, putting himself a few inches lower than her. He felt loads better then. Or, at least he was able to slow down his breathing some.

"Clothes," Winky said, looking him up and down.

Slow breathing flew out the window. "What?" he managed to squeak in between hyperventilations.

"Master Fenrir needs human clothes to wear."

He'd been afraid that was what she meant.

She bowed. "Master Fenrir stays here. Impy will bring them."

She was gone before he'd quite realized what she had said. Fenrir—his full elfin name. Not Fen. Not Little Fen. Fenrir. A full name was a sign of respect and power. Only adult House Elves were called their full names—and only on Halloween. Now it was All Santa Day…no, All Sense…oh, whatever they called the day after Halloween! Not Halloween. It was not Halloween.

She'd called him Master.

His eyes widened at that thought. He was so shocked, he fell backwards and hit his head on the flagstones. Wincing, he stared up at the Dungeon ceiling. House Elves were not called Master. Not ever. Master was a word for humans. There were human titles, and there were House Elf titles. Only one title could be used on both. Mista' was the most honorable title for a House Elf—and the lowest of the low for some scumbag human.

And Impy, his friend, only two decades older than him, had called him Master. He blinked. Oh Hell, she'd called him it twice! He turned on his side and spied a splash of green in the pile of blue silk that had been Impy's makeshift dress. The gloves. His face darkened. This was happening because of them. He was going to burn them, when he got the chance. Maybe everything would go back to normal, when they were gone.

But that was only a stupid childish hope, like when he'd thought everything was all right just because the screaming had stopped.

XXX

Impy returned, wrapped up in her usual toga of old green curtain. In her bony arms was a bundle of folded clothes. She was obviously at war with herself. Fen discovered why when he found the letters DM stitched into the shirt collar. These clothes belonged to Draco Monster. The boy had grown out of them years ago—they smelled like the attic—but they were his, and Impy was technically stealing from her master to give them to Fen. He eyed the House Elf warily, half expecting her to start bashing her brains out on the flagstones as punishment. She seemed remarkably in control. She only twitched occasionally, muttering something about 'her Lord not her Master' that he couldn't quite hear.

Except for the twitching, they were still for a long time. Then Impy nodded resolutely. "Master Fenrir must go into the human world and pretend to be human child, yes."

Fen felt his jaw go slack. Impy's brain had addled when he grabbed her. He stammered, "No, no I—"

She took his face in her knobby hands. "Must go. Lord Malfoy will kill Master Fenrir if he stays and chops him into Potions ingredients!" As Fen's eyes bulged, she shook her head. "That's why House Elves never tell about Halloweeny. If humans knew House Elves could be Tall, they'd chop us up. Master Fenrir must pretend. He must put on the clothes."

"Don't call me Master," he begged. "Call me Fen, Impy. Please?"

"Yes, Fen," she sighed, but she said Fen the same way she said Master Fenrir. He hated it. But he was scared, and he put on the clothes. Impy, wringing her hands, decided to be industrious. She stood at his back and starting picking the embroidered DM out of the shirt. As she worked, he sat and babbled.

"Fen can't pretend to be human, Impy. I can't. I don't know the first thing about being human!"

She giggled when he said that. "Ma—Fen puts on all the clothes perfectly human-like, and he says he can't pretend to be humanlike." She sighed. "When Fen first came to Malfoy Manor, he spoke human-like—still speaks human-like sometimes. It will be fine. Fine, yes." She had finished with the DM-removal and was running her hands through his hair. He realized she was crying. He was crying.

Why had this happened? It was horrible. Being Tall was supposed to be the best part of a House Elf's life. But he was Tall all alone. And he made a very small Tall person. He wanted to be a small House Elf instead, helping with the cleaning up of the Malfoys' Halloween Party.

He looked around at the Dungeon. "Let me stay here," he begged, but she shook her head. The Malfoys would find him, she stuttered. Shaking very hard, she pointed at the stairs out of the Dungeon and into the human world.

He went. He didn't get halfway up the steps before he heard her break into sobs and start bashing herself into the stone. He froze until she started to shriek in pain—and then he ran. He ran very fast, into the forest of dead trees.

XXX

So many miles away, but actually closer than you'd think, an emergency faculty meeting had been called at Hogwarts, School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. They all gathered round in the headmaster's office peering at a parchment on the desk in bewilderment. It very much resembled the school's list of new students that mysteriously arrived on the desk every July. But it was November now, and there was only one name. And what a name it was.

_Fenrir Albtraum Svartálfar._

"Well, what does it mean?" Professor Lupin asked at last.

The sleep inducing voice of the deceased history professor floated down to them all. "The first and last words of the phrase, I would surmise, are old Norse. The middle, however, is decidedly German…"

At that moment, every living teacher's eyes met each other's simultaneously. There was over ten of them. To do so caused them to go severely cross-eyed and feel enormous pain. It would be nothing compared to the horror in store if they didn't stop the dead man soon. They all knew a lead-in in to a long lecture on the Goblin Wars (fought mainly on German turf) when they heard one. Unfortunately, it was impossible to stuff a sock in a ghost's mouth.

At that moment, Severus Snape was a blessing to them all.

"I could care less about the origins of the boy's name," he drawled, paused, waited, and then snapped, _"Just tell me why he has only just been enrolled two months into the term!"_

The history professor's words cut off beautifully, and they were back on subject.

Albus Dumbledore, the Headmaster and the only one sitting, was thoughtful for a long time. Then he declared, "I have absolutely no idea. Well, let's find him then."


	4. Where is He?

_**Service Message  
**_I should have updated sooner, but I've been stuck in this Tenth Circle of Hell thing called AP Calculus. I'm still stuck, but I've been upgraded to a flaming cesspool with Internet access. Unfortunately, I also have a lot of crazy, College Application, SAT, Art Portfolio Review stuff to do…so updates for this aren't going to be coming lickety-split. They will keep coming, though, right until I hit that stupid multiple-choice plot thing in the 4th year, damn it to Hell. …Sorry, babbling. Read. Enjoy.  
_**End of Service Message

* * *

**_

The owl took its letter to the address registry in London. Every person in the British Isles (and every "magical creature" who didn't get to claim the title of person) was listed there, no matter if they lived in a magical mansion in the country or in a cardboard box in the alley down the street. Boxes weren't the oddest of addresses either. People lived in some very peculiar places, and the registry knew about every one. Harry Potter being in that closet under the stair seemed downright normal in comparison.

Deep in the recesses of the musty building, a bookish little fellow at a desk hollered, "Next!"

The large, brown barn owl alighted on the available perch and dropped the letter without an address on the desk, careful to avoid the army of burning candles lining the sides. The man picked up the handsome envelope and eyed the name on the attached note in the flickering light. "Fenrir Albtraum Svartálfar, hmm." He said nothing more. When one worked with as many names as he did, exceptional names were commonplace and only merited a small smile or frown before he went on with his work.

He wrote the name into a large parchment nailed onto his desk. The paper absorbed the ink, and then let its reply surface.

"There's six Fenrir A. Svartál…Svart…six Fenrirs in the registry," he informed the owl. "Is there anything that would narrow it down a bit?"

The brown bird turned her head around a full half turn. The clerk got the gist and flipped the letter around. His eyebrow rose slightly at the sight of the seal holding the letter closed. "Hogwarts? Hmm, new student then. It's a bit late, though, ain't it?" It was a rhetorical question. His job was to get mail to its destination, not to hunt through it for answers. He wrote into the parchment: '_10 or 11 years old.'_ No reply came. Odd. Unless the boy was cheating with of those pesky Fidelus charms, he had to show up. The clerk tried '_prospective Hogwarts student.'_

Black ink churned, welling up onto the stretched parchment in a thick black puddle. Then it was sucked back in, leaving a name and a place.

_'Fenrir Albtraum Svartálfar  
The Forbidden Forest'_

He scrawled _'Mr. F. Svartálfar'_ and the address on the letter, looked up at the owl, and shrugged. "Best I can do, girl. Good luck, trying to track down this fella'. I hear that forest's big."

There was a moment when the owl stayed stock-still on the perch. Then she swooped down, pouncing on the letter angrily with a strong downbeat of her wings that blew out every candle on the desk.

After she huffed out, the clerk relit them with a wave of his wand and a muttered, _"Wimmin'."_

XXX

Nibble had narrowly escaped becoming dinner five times in the last hour—_just_ in the last hour. Needless to say, she wasn't a very happy owl.

There was a reason why she had given up the Forbidden Forest route and its handsome hazards pay. It was the same reason why she had taken up a post in the Hogwarts owlery. At the school, she could glare at the dark tree line from a safe distance without ever going into it. Hogwarts children were specifically forbidden from the aptly named forest, so she knew with certainty that she would never, under any circumstances, need to deliver there.

Fenrir Albtraum Svartálfar's acceptance letter was in danger of becoming owl pellets.

It dangled from her leg as she swooped beneath the tree canopies, jarring her with each silent wing beat. She was in a hunting mode. This Fenrir child was her prey. When she finally found him—well. Let it suffice to say that _he_ would be owl pellets in the near future.

XXX

Fen stumbled through the trees, his speed fueled only by fear. Above him, dying light burned holes through the forest canopy, casting down leaves shriveled and singed by autumn's fire. The death-like sleep of night loomed near.

He dreaded the sun's setting. It would mark his second night in the forest, away from the quiet manor he had known all his life. The world around him frightened him. It changed as he ran deeper into the trees, and it was a dark metamorphosis. Grass died, then disappeared. Bushes exchanged their shriveled berries for thorns. The creatures he saw stalking in the corners of his eyes were growing larger. Even the trees were different, now blackened trunks and gnarled limbs.

All this he saw through a haze of terror, despair, and exhaustion.

He collapsed in a hollow at the foot of a large tree as two days of running caught up with him. Oblivion wasn't far behind.

The light filtering in between the branches took on the hue of dying embers. Night came even as his vision faded to black, and he dreamt of a large spider looming over him as the woman's familiar screams began.

XXX

Impy sat in a recessed corner of the kitchen, nursing a butterbeer while her mother nursed her head with a poultice. She ignored the inquiring looks of large, bulging eyes throughout the room, even her own mother's. The elfin woman fretted over the pulped flesh of her daughter's head and tried to get the girl to speak of what had happened. Impy's teeth were clenched shut in a very unhelpful manner. Whispers drifted through the room as dinner for the Malfoys got underway.

They knew what had happened to Fen—now Dobbin, forever. Mista' Odin had told the eldest of the Malfoy House Elves the terrible news before his departure on Halloweeny, and he had told the rest of them. It had been decided that the gloves would be burned and the accidental freeing kept secret. Dobbin would remain a House Elf in the manor, and the Malfoys would never know the difference.

And they would just weather the Halloweenys with him the best they could.

So they had prepared for Impy and Dobbin's return with comforting smiles, but the young House Elves never came home. At sundown on All Saints', a search party had snuck out of the manor. They found Impy still on the castle's dungeon floor with guilty tears and head wounds and two green gloves, but Dobbin was gone.

A day later, there had been no sign of him. Impy was sometimes heard muttering something unintelligible, but otherwise she didn't speak. The question remained in every elf's mind: _'Where is he?'_

XXX

Nibble, in her frustration, had started to tear apart a corner of that blasted F. Svartálfar's letter with her beak. She had been in the Forest for a day now, and there was still no sign of the brat.

She lunged, ripping out more paper guts. _Where was he?_

XXX

There was a creak of a little used door, and the House Elves gasped as Lucius Malfoy stalked into the kitchen. His pale eyes swept across them, dissecting and discarding each elf. When he didn't find what he looked for, he did a second search for signs of guilt. A glare settled on Impy and her mashed head.

"Where is he?" he snapped. "Where is that stunted, pathetic runt!"

XXX

After his usual death threat to the house elves who would be decontaminating the Potions classroom for the upcoming school week, Severus Snape left the magically sealed off, steel-reinforced dungeon and stormed through the halls towards the headmaster's office. His Slytherin upbringing had taught him to keep his ear to the ground, and lately he had been hearing some very disturbing things. He intended to give Albus Dumbledore an earful about each one. And to get some answers.

As luck would have it, he caught the wizard on the staircase that led to the dormitories during mealtimes. It also led to the Dining Hall during class time and to the classrooms during lights out. A thoroughly uncooperative stair. Him finding Albus on it was its first good act of service, in his opinion.

He glared down at the headmaster from a good four steps up, somehow still feeling shorter than the man. That didn't stop him from putting on a dangerous face and stalking down until they stood only one step apart. "Dumbledore," he began in that light, silky tone that was a whetting stone for the barbed words to come.

The walls around him rumbled slightly, as they had been doing for the past week.

Then he paused and shot a look at the stone walls, realizing it would be better to have this conversation safely in Hogsmeade—or better yet, across the ocean in a den of vipers.

He chose his words with all the tact of a Slytherin who knew his life was forfeit with a slip of the tongue. "I hear that our late arrival hasn't replied to his letter. Yet." The _yet_ was an important thing to say. "Perhaps he is a Muggleborn who mistook it for a joke? I suggest we send a teacher to retrieve the boy. Now"

Albus's voice was so quiet he had to crane to hear it. "It's only been two days, and Believe me Severus," the man sighed, "I would gladly send the entire staff, if I knew we could get a hold of the boy. His address has been a slight problem."

Severus tried not to pinch the bridge of his nose. "Not a Fidelus charm."

"Fortunately, no. The boy _is_ in the registry."

His eyebrows snapped up and he reared back. "We know where the boy is—and he hasn't been retrieved!"

The Headmaster's eyes widened. The crowd of portraits on the walls ran for the hills in the background of a painting far away, leaving the three-dimensional men to fend for themselves. The Potions Master himself froze. That had been a monstrous slip of the tongue. It was, quite possibly, the worst slip in Hogwarts history.

The school had long been spelled to enforce fairness. No matter how muddy the bloodlines of the students were or how selective the teaching staff was, by Merlin, every eligible child would be allowed to attend. So the school made up the lists of children who would come, the school made sure every one of those children showed up, and the school would bloody pulverize any faculty member whom it thought was an enemy to the cause.

And Severus's words had made it sound like they were denying the boy entry to Hogwarts.

There was an ominous rumbling of stone beneath their feet. Albus and Severus looked down to watch the staircase split in two between them. Clinging to the banisters, they were thrown hard in opposite directions. Thankfully, Albus's half stopped and seemed satisfied when he took a tumble to his knees. Severus, though, had the unluck of his stair crashing into the nearest wall, knocking him loose from the stone railing. He made a desperate grab for the edge of a step, finding purchase as the walls grumbled.

He was granted a moment's peace to hang, catch his breath, and stare down through the hundreds of feet of empty space that angry stairwells crashed about madly in.

Albus managed to climb to his feet on his staircase half. Then the school rumbled. Severus's half swung violently back towards its twin. The Potions Master had visions of the two halves reconnecting with his corpse smashed in between the two.

The long drop down suddenly looked very comforting. He let go and fell onto a whiplashing staircase. It froze when he made contact, as if stunned. He clung to the banister to keep from crashing down the stairs. In the moment of stillness he looked up towards the ceiling of Hogwarts and swore, "I'll bring the boy here myself!"

All movement ceased and the school gave one last rumble that sounded like a decisive snort before growing silent once more. Severus got to his knees, breathing hard, and looked up at the headmaster. He wondered why the man had gotten off with a figurative slap on the wrist.

Reading his mind, as usual, Albus answered, "I'm old, frail, and I've personally made sure some of Hogwarts'…less welcome students were allowed to attend." He propped his arms and head on the banister, sighing. "I do believe the old girl has developed a soft spot for me." He left out the point that Severus was a notorious Slytherin, whereas Albus was the anti-thesis.

Severus turned and leaned against his own banister. At the moment, he hated the school but didn't dare say anything out loud. He closed his eyes and asked, "Where, exactly, is this boy I promised to bring for—her?

"Somewhere in the Forbidden Forest."

The dark professor whipped around to stare up at Albus. "You can't be serious."

The old wizard shook his head sadly. "I'm afraid so. And, Severus?" he added, "Do try to find the boy quickly. The old girl will become quite tetchy if Mr. Svartálfar should die." A devilish twinkle entered his eyes as he put on the mask of the senile, old fool. "Lovely way to start a weekend, don't you think? Good luck. Now I'm off to breakfast."

Severus let his head fall back into the stone banister. Hard.

XXX

Fen started awake in a dead sweat, cocooned in a suffocating bundle. He struggled to get out and succeeded except for his legs, which became hopelessly tangled in the mess. At least he could breathe. He breathed very fast when he realized he had been moved in his sleep. His eyes flitted around the dim, cavernous place, wondering, _'Where am I?'_

XXX

* * *

…**Good question. God knows I've asked it enough. So. Got any ideas?**


	5. Agoraphobe & Owl Boy

**...Dammit. I have no self-control. The point of building up a stockpile of chapters was so I would update once a week while writing on ahead. ...Scratch that. You guys get two chapters in two days. Happy Halloween '06, y'all.**

_The Adventures of Agoraphobe and Owl-Boy _

_

* * *

_

Fen's eyes darted around. Finding nothing, he pulled himself up and tried to free himself from the tangled mess that trapped his legs but froze when something scuttled at the edge of his vision.

His head whipped around to watch the human hurriedly back out of the small, dimly lit room. He shrank back as well, so far that he fell out of the reclining easy chair and hit the wood plank floor. Thrashing, he got free of the blankets and cowered, clutching at the chair arm. His small fingers dug into the rustic texture of the orange and green cloth as he stared across the alien-looking living room at the doorway the stranger had disappeared through.

He was frightened out of his wits. It was the room that scared him most of all. The floorboards were dull, rough, and the large gaps between them were caulked with a mixture of dirt and grime. A wall-to-wall bookcase had shelves that slanted at sometimes near-vertical angles. The furniture was a mix-and-match affair of wrongly assembled pieces. More books had been shoved under table legs that were shorter than their stepbrothers. Every available horizontal surface was piled with dirty pots and books and stacks of a combination of the two. Dust ruled. The armchair's color was reminiscent of vomit. In short, the room was the most anti-Malfoy thing imaginable.

For the first time in his life, Fen wanted Draco Monster. Desperately.

Instead, he was saddled with the stranger as it came back into the room.

He peered over the puke-colored chair at the human, who stood and clutched at the doorframe, staring back at him. It was spindly wraith of a human that uncomfortably reminded Fen of a large spider that had lost four legs. It had long, feminine hands and a pointed chin. The chin was the only part of its face that he could see from under the mess of uncombed black hair.

It was sort of twitching.

Fen shrank back, and the human did the same.

"He—hello, there," it said in a male-sounding voice. Their standoff lasted for several minutes, but then the man spluttered, "D—done my duty. Kept you from being ea—eat…from becoming Were-food, now get back to your parents."

He looked away and all but ducked down under the chair. "Don't have parents, sir."

"Oh." The man looked like he wanted to sit down, but the only chair in sight was the one Fen was hiding behind. Neither of them was willing to take a step closer to one another, so they stayed where they were.

After a minute, Fen blinked. Was it just him, or was the man as afraid of him as he was afraid of the man?

XXX

They eventually called a sort of truce when hunger kicked in and cautiously retreated into the kitchen. The man made a large batch of what looked to Fen like very thick crêpes. 'Henry,' he mumbled his name was while awkwardly using a fork to flip his creations in the frying pan.

The Ex-House Elf didn't give the man his name. He didn't know how to. 'Dobbin' wasn't a traditional House Elf name, but it certainly wasn't human either. 'Fen' had always been a secret name, and he went pale at the thought of being called 'Fenrir.' So he just stayed quiet as Henry sat down at the opposite end of the very long kitchen table and pushed a laden plate across the table at him.

He stared at the plate when it slid to a stop before him. He wrung his hands uncomfortably. He hadn't known humans could cook. Apparently they could, and he was sure the thick, fluffy crêpe things were delicious, but it just didn't feel right. How could he eat something that a human had made for him?

He suddenly felt very tired. His entire world had been turned on its head. He was Tall when it wasn't Halloween, he wasn't frantically trying to clean the dirty room before the Malfoys saw it, and a human was serving _him_.

He got up and started to fix a quick breakfast. Everything was a little high for him, but he had been small for a House Elf too, so it wasn't much of a change. Eggs, fried ham, and a few experiments made from the leftover thick-crêpe batter ended up on two battered plates. He shoved the better quality of the two towards Henry from across the table and sat again. He ate quickly, eyes downcast as he desperately tried to ignore the fact that he was sitting and eating at the same table as a human.

He failed.

He watched Henry cautiously poke at the eggs before hazarding a bite. Any reservations the man had disappeared, and he began shoveling the food into his mouth. Fen swallowed. He had only given Henry a plate of what he had made to be polite. He hadn't expected his host to actually eat it. It was House Elf food, not human food.

Fortunately, the human didn't seem to notice the difference.

He decided that what Henry didn't know wouldn't hurt him. And it wouldn't hurt Fen either. The boy finished his own plate, and finding himself still hungry, rationalized that it would be rude not to accept what a human had given him. He took a bite of the thick-crêpes—and blanched.

He had been right. Humans couldn't cook.

XXX

Surviving and delighting in each other's cooking respectively, Fen and Henry retreated outside to where they could put more distance between themselves. They sat on opposite ends of a rickety back porch while an ax chopped wood by itself at a nearby log. It unnerved Fen. He had hoped that Henry was one of those Muggle humans that were always running around, ones that didn't know about elves of any variety. He knew he looked human enough to fool most everybody, but he also knew his pointed ears would be dead giveaways to a wizard. For the first time in his life, he was glad they were small and safely hidden in his wild hair.

As he sat and watched the ax—and tried not to think about it chopping him up for Potions—he supposed that it had been fairly obvious that Henry was magical. The man had talked about Weres, after all, and it _would_ take magic to hold his ramshackle house together.

Henry caught him staring at the ax with bulging eyes. "You aren't Muggle, are you?" he asked, and Fen watched in alarm as he reached towards a pocket.

Fen shook his head. "No, no! Wizardkind." He swallowed the lie, but was glad to see Henry put down his hand. That pocket had a dangerous-looking lump in it. Fen looked out past the small clearing at the dark woods, the place of monsters and nightmares. And screaming. He tucked his knees under his chin.

"Not in the floo network," he heard the man say distractedly. "D—do—I can't apparate…erm. And there's nothing for miles. No roads. No people."

No more humans. Fen was relieved to hear that. Henry was more than enough.

XXX

The morning sun rose higher, peeking over the thinning, silver-leafed trees. For a long time they sat in uncomfortable silence; neither was brave enough to speak first, so it only stretched longer. Then, suddenly, it ended. Henry went from his seat to a crouch before it and asked, _"What is that?"_ with a dangerous, sharp focus in his black eyes as he scanned the woods. Fen scuttled back away from the edge of the porch, instantly nervous. He gaped at Henry as the man pulled out what looked like an enormous wand from underneath his chair and aimed it point blank at the tree line.

A feral growl escaped the human's lips. A thunderclap sounded from the overlarge wand. Fen closed his eyes in a wince and clapped his hands over his unfortunately sensitive ears. It was a complete surprise when he was dive-bombed in the chest. He fell back and slammed against the wall in a heap. He clenched his teeth, bracing himself for death.

Much to his relief, it never came. Cautiously, he cracked open one eye, only to gulp. Sitting on him with her blazing yellow eyes three inches from his was an absolutely murderous, seething mad, owl.

She looked hungry.

XXX

It was a boy, a roughly school-aged boy in the middle of the Forbidden Forest. If his name wasn't Fenrir Albtraum Svartálfar, it was going to be or he was going to be dinner. She had searched the entire forest looking for him, except for one place. She had given that place a wide berth because she had almost been killed there too many times to count. Then the process of elimination just had to prove that the boy was in that one hated place.

Her searching was over. This boy was going to Dumbledore. If the wizard said it was the wrong child and that she had to do a second sweep of the forest, she would just kill the old fool, take his place as headmaster, and sign a law forbidding Hogwarts to teach students from the Forbidden Forest.

"Oh no, not you again!"

She whipped her head around to face the speaker. It was him, the wizard with the boom-stick that shot metal. Her eyes hardened.

XXX

Fen stared as the owl launched herself at Henry and started pecking at him furiously.

_'Fiend! You planned this, you vile, rancid pile of owl pellets. You knew I'd have to come here!'_

Henry growled back, "Come back to torture me some more, you blasted bird? You won't get away this time!"

Apparently, they knew one another. They spoke different languages, but they still managed to rant at each other fairly well. Fen watched them with his mouth ajar.

'_Beast!'_ She powered her wings and clawed at his face.

"I'll rip you apart!" He tried to hit her with the enormous wand.

'_Snake!'_ She pounced on his hand, making him drop his weapon.

They kept going at it, neither managing to get the upper hand—or wing. Finally, Henry caved. "Fine!" he shouted and ripped something off the bird's leg. It was a letter. Then he looked back at Fen. "This isn't my name." He turned the letter and stared at the seal affixed to it. "Hogwarts?" he asked aloud. "In _November_?"

"_Hogwarts?"_ repeated Fen in the same tone of confused disbelief.

"Look for yourself," the man said and tossed the letter to him.

The owl used the distraction as an opportunity to peck Henry soundly on the forehead. The pair's epic struggle started up again, giving Fen some interesting background noise as he stared down at the letter.

Mr. F Svartálfar.

Svartálfar, it was an Elfin name. Could it be his name? Fenrir Svartálfar? He suddenly felt a chill. These people knew his name. They knew more of his name than he did. What else did they know? Trembling, he turned the letter over. He recognized the great wax symbol from other letters, ones that had said what Draco needed to go to school. Dread filled his veins. "Oh, no," he whispered. How long would his disguise last while surrounded by hundreds of Wizarding folk? How long would he last with Draco Monster? "I can't go _there,_" he gasped.

The sounds of the owl attacking Henry stopped. Fen threw up his arms just in time to avoid being maimed by her talons. _'You little beast!'_ she screeched._ 'I hunted through the whole forsaken forest to find you, and you say you're not going? Think again! You're going if I have to eat you and cough up your pellets on the headmaster's desk!'_

Fen gulped. "Please don't do that," he said hurriedly. "I don't want to be owl pellets."

She froze and tilted her head to one side at an unnerving angle. _'You can hoot Owlish?'_ she asked.

He nodded dumbly.

_'Oh, thank Archimedes! Quick! Tell Boom-Stick Man that if he'll sign a waiver, the post owls won't ever go near him again!'_

Fen only stared at the owl until her glare came back, and then he blurted, "She says if you sign a waiver, the post owls will stay away. Who's Archimedes?"

"_Merlin's owl."_ She started hopping excitedly on him as Henry stared at them both. _'Hooh, I could…well, you're too young for that. Just go to Hogwarts. I would hate to kill you.'_

"But I can't"—his eyes flew open—"I'll go! I'll go!"

She removed her beak from its position two millimeters from his left eye. _'I knew you'd see it my way, Nestling.'_

Henry gaped at him. "You can speak owl?"

_'Owlish.'_

"Owlish," Fen parroted.

"...Ah."

XXX

Fen sat on the floor of the living room as the owl dictated a letter that he passed on to Henry.

"'…understand that this is irreversible. Now take me off the mailing list, you'—Nibble don't call your Mast…Boss that! …Just write 'Please take me off the mailing list.' And sign it."

Nibble hooted excitedly from the rafters, _'Hooh, this is so much fun!'_ She went on about giving someone called Dumbledore an earful.

Henry stared at Fen sympathetically as he folded the notification letter. "M—must be hard, hav—h—having that bird talking your ear off." Now that the anger had left his system, his nervous stutter was back.

_'Tell him I'm gonna puke mouse remains on his head.'_

Fen blanched more at the thought of telling Henry that than at the image itself. He still didn't like the image. "Wear a hat, sir," he suggested. Henry glared up at Nibble. She glared back.

They did that a lot.

Fen glared down at the Hogwarts letter. Two days ago, life had been normal. Now he was a fugitive masquerading as a different species, sitting in a cramped room with a homicidal owl and the Anti-Malfoy, about to be shipped off to a school dungeon full of snaky Draco Monsters.

He sighed.

He needed a butterbeer.


	6. Misunderstanding—oh, really

**Chapter 6: Misunderstanding—oh, really?**

**An update. Yay. ...Can I sleep now? **

**

* * *

**

Severus couldn't believe he was doing this. Yes, he owed Albus three lifetimes of favors, but when had he ever agreed to be a possessed castle's errand boy? Fervently, he wished that Salazar Slytherin had given up on Hogwarts completely and just created his own school—one that couldn't murder the teaching staff. Damn battle enchantments. Damn Godric Gryffindor for casting them in a school, the idiot. What had Salazar ever seen in the barbaric, bloodthirsty brute?

As Severus continued to fume, he finished rattling off a long list of directions. "Do you understand all that?" he demanded of the creature standing in his Potions lab.

The bizarrely dressed House Elf blinked up at him with eyes the size of Snitches. "Yes, Professor Snape, sir. Dobby does, sir."

This was another thing Severus couldn't believe. An ex-Malfoy House was the only pers—living being capable of keeping the cauldrons in back room from exploding while he was gone. He repressed a groaning sigh. The career of Potions Master had seemed so illustrious in his youth. Now the only good it was to him was that he would know when Lucius Malfoy tried to poison him.

Lucius would never forgive him for taking on the services of the House Elf that had—he tried to bite back the inescapable smirk. Silently, he wondered if Lucius would ever live _that_ down. "No one is to see you here," he added to Dobby with a glare. He prayed that, for once, a secret at Hogwarts would remain secret.

Dobby nodded repetitively, gushing, "Oh, of course, Professor Snape, sir. It woulds be a low blow, a House Elf that won'ts obey his own masters to willingly serve their family friend. How _bad_." The House Elf's mouth twitched. "Dobby woulds never want to be seen and embarrass his old masters."

Severus stared at the creature. Had that been a sarcastic smirk? "You are _not_ to be seen," he repeated, eyes flashing.

The House Elf seemed a bit put out at that, but nodded.

The castle rumbled. The Potions Master glanced sharply up at the ceiling and decided it was time to leave. "Bar the classroom doors if I'm not back by Monday," he said when he was ten feet from the door.

"Of course, Professor, sir."

Nine feet from the door: "And keep a close watch on cauldron eight in the back."

"Of course."

Nine feet again: "And—"

"_Severus."_

He stopped at stared back at the House Elf.

"Old Dobby may look the fool to you grand Wizarding types," it said with a raised, bushy eyebrow, "but he knows which end of the spoon goes in the cauldron. Go now. Dobby can handle things while you're gone."

Inexplicably, Severus was reminded of his Muggle father: hopelessly out of place in the Wizarding world, but competent all the same. Without another word, he left the dungeon—

—And almost walked smack dab into Albus Dumbledore's beard. The headmaster had been standing in the doorway—for how long was uncertain. Instinctively, Severus pulled the door shut behind him to hide Dobby from view, even though the headmaster had been the one to recommend the creature. "Yes?" he demanded.

Albus raised up a roll of parchment in one hand. "The status spell on Mr. Svartálfar's letter," he explained. "It may be of some help. The letter has been delivered—but not opened—and has remained at this location for several hours."

Severus took the scroll and unrolled it. There was a pause as he stared at a map of the Forbidden Forest with a red dot on the western fringe. Then he tapped it repetitively, each time giving him a closer view of the dot's location. Finally, it showed up at the center of a triangular-shaped clearing inside the rough sketch of a house. His face went slack.

XXX

Dobby looked up, startled, when Severus stormed into the back room. The man didn't stop, only stalked to the wall between cauldrons four and five and slugged one of the dark bricks, knocking it back. The rest of the wall slunk away, revealing a shelf of potion vials.

Severus crammed several into the pockets of his robes, and then took up a small, black bottle. He twisted the stopper left, right, and left again, much like a Muggle would turn a combination lock, and then pulled it off. He took the barest of sips before replacing bottle on the shelf. The brick wall reformed. _"You did not see this,"_ he ordered Dobby with the blackest of looks.

_And then he apparated._

XXX

In a last ditch effort for normalcy, Fen had resorted to cleaning. Henry's house was a nightmare, but he was making progress. The dishes were now scrubbed and stored in the kitchen instead of in the bookshelves. The floor was swept. Most of the dirt had fallen into the cranks between planks, but he wasn't going to take that gunk out until he was sure something wasn't going to crawl out after it.

Henry finally caught on to what Fen was doing and barricaded him from the bedroom. After much confused thought, Fen realized that Henry was just being territorial. And who could blame the man? House Elves would be twitching for days if a human tried to reorder their kitchens for them. So he moved on.

And found himself before the axe.

The deadly sharp wedge of metal had solidly clunked itself into a tree stump. Fen pulled on the handle forward, backwards, and straight up with both feet planted on the stump before it finally loosened and sent them both flying. He checked to see if he had been cleaved to death, exhaled gratefully when he wasn't, and turned to glare at axe stuck in the ground a few feet away. The sharp implement of death gleamed innocently in the late afternoon light.

Fen pulled it from the cold dirt cautiously. The long handle rested awkwardly in his small arms, dipping towards the ground on the side with the axe head. He turned around in the yard, careful of his burden as he turned, and searched for a place to get rid of it. Impy's words spoke again in his head every time he looked at it.

'_Will kill Master Fenrir and chops him into Potions ingredients.'_

There was a gardening shed half-hidden in the shadows of the tree line. Fen made a beeline for it, dragging the axe behind him. He had to drop it to get the heavy door open. It was six inches thick, or at least felt that way. Why was everything in the human world so large, he wondered as the wooden slab of a door creaked open inch by laborious inch. His eyes were clenched tightly shut. Even individual hairs strained themselves. Every bit of him went into opening that door—except his feet. They kept treacherously skidding across the dirt.

But he overcame. The door opened, and he heaved breaths, repressing the nightmarish thought that he would have to close the door too.

Sighing, he opened his eyes. The inside of the shed was nearly black. He squinted into the darkness. The wind picked up. There was a creaking noise. An unforgettable scent drilled through his skull, into the back of his brain. His instincts gushed out of the hole, flushing his body with both power and crippling fear. He shrank back. Light wormed past him into the darkness and illuminated a dark, many-layered stain on the wooden floor. Above it hung dull chains.

Shackles and blood. Impy's words screamed at him. An image of being cleaved to death by the axe flooded his mind. The forest suddenly seemed a thousand times safer than here. He turned around fast, and Henry was standing in the doorway.

The human's eyes were cold and monstrous. Fen's traitorous feet stumbled back into the shed.

"Y—you shouldn't be here," Henry said and reached into his pocket as he advanced on Fen. His hand came out cupping a small mound of violet powder, which he blew into the boy's face.

Fen sneezed. The smell, it deadened everything, and he slumped unconscious into the man's waiting arms.

XXX

Henry laid Fen, wrapped in blankets, on the reclining chair. Frowning, he reached forward to pull a wild tangle of dark curls away from boy's face and behind his ear. But a popping sound stalled any action he was about to take.

He jerked up and turned to the man who had suddenly appeared in the room. He relaxed, seeing who it was. "Severus," he smiled. "What are you doing here? I haven't seen you in… And it's the middle of the school"—his eyes flicked to the Hogwarts letter for Mr. F. Svartálfar sitting unopened on the nearby desk—"Ah." He straightened and gestured to a doorway. "Let's go into the kitchen. I'll whip you up some cocoa."

The wizard in dark robes frowned. "I'm a little old for that, Henry."

"Tea, then."

"I don't have any poison antidote with me."

"Cocoa, then. And you can scowl and pretend you don't love it."

XXX

Severus sat, sipping from a steaming mug. He looked around occasionally. The kitchen was different than he remembered. But then it had been years, an even dozen of them. He glanced in the direction of the living room and the boy sleeping there. A lot could change in that time. "You've really cleaned this place up," he remarked.

Henry ducked his head down. "That's the boy's doing. Regular whirlwind with a dust rag. Got everything but the bedroom," he sighed, and then took a sip from his own cup. The two of them sat at the long kitchen table. They had moved the chairs from the opposite ends to the middle and awkwardly tried to keep from stepping on each other's toes.

Severus looked down at his drink. "Who's the mother?"

Henry choked. Mid-cough, he spluttered, "No! Just a boy. Found him in the woods. Orphan", he added, as if to drive the point home.

Severus turned to the side and sighed, only partly in relief. "I'm Sorry. It just that he looks like—"

"Dad with curls," Henry finished for him. "It's eerie. At first, I thought he might be yours." He smiled at Severus's snort. "I can dream, can't I? And you'd make a good father, Severus."

He shook his head. "My students would say otherwise."

"So you're still teaching at Hogwarts? I seem to recall getting that letter"—Henry shot a murderous glance up towards the ceiling—"chewed half to pieces!"

Severus turned and looked up. Perched on the top of an opened door was a large brown owl. "Pet?" he asked.

"Waking nightmare."

"Ah. I have one or two of those myself. Six, actually. All Gryffindors."

Henry laughed, and then sighed, "I've missed you, Severus. You're the only person I don't feel scared around." When Severus didn't say anything, he looked at a small window set over the kitchen sink. The sun was almost set, and reddish light streamed into the room. He swallowed. "Can't stall with this, can I? I'm glad you've come, Sev. I—I need your help." He reached into his pocket and placed a pouch onto the table.

Stitched into the side, black as basilisk blood, was the ministry insignia—and in crimson, the words _Obliviating Stupefyer: for use on Muggles._

As Severus's gaze on him sharpened, he slumped and rested his head on his folded arms. "Found the boy collapsed in the woods 'round sunset last night. I thought he would be safe in the house, at least for the night and some of the morning, until I could figure out how to get him back to his folks—but he doesn't have folks. Thought of handing him to the police in that little Muggle town to the west, but he's Wizarding kind—and most of the Muggles there are unregistered Weres anyway.

"After getting that letter, I was planning to take him out at dawn and get him onto Hogwarts' grounds before sunset—but—" He sighed. "Sev, he found the shed."

Severus started to rub at his left temple. "And you panicked." He looked up and pinned the other man with a glare. "Henry, memory modifiers are for _Muggles!_ How did you even get that?"—he gestured at the pouch and waited for an answer that didn't come—"Tell me you at least know how to administer it properly." He got only silence. He ran his hand over his face. Standing, he said, "Follow me. I'm going to check on him right now."

Henry went pale. He sat unmoving, staring out the window as the last rays of the sun winked out. "I—I can't do that, Sev. You kn—n—know I—" He stopped and stared at the vial Severus had plunked down in front of him.

"Drink it" he was commanded, and when Severus got that way, there was no arguing with him. He choked down the liquid and its rancid taste.

"Jesus, Sev!" he coughed. "Couldn't you make it—"

"The properties of the potion are easily nullified. If I added something to make it bearable, it wouldn't work."

He blinked, uncomprehending. "What does it do?" he asked.

Severus caught his eyes with a meaningful look. "It will help."

XXX

Henry suddenly stood, clutching his stomach. He stared out the window. "It's not—I need to—" But Severus's hand latched onto his shoulder and pushed him back into his seat. "Sev," he whispered and shook when the man placed one hand over his. The light of the half-full moon peeked through the trees. A gasp escaped Henry, and he doubled over.

Severus held his hand tightly as the slender fingers elongated further. The pads of the fingers turned gray, and dark hairs lanced through the skin of the back of the hand. Hard nails transformed into points and spasmed in pain, digging deep claw marks through the wood of the table.

Then Henry sagged in the chair, and Severus cautiously let him go. Henry straightened and stared at his monstrous hands. "It didn't work," he sighed, "I still"—he froze—"I can still think." He turned to Severus with his mouth hanging open. "How—"

It was the Potions Master turn to stare out at the moon. "When transformed Weres ingest Wolfsbane, it kills them," he said. "But they die _human._ Something in the plant reverses the transformation. I've been working to separate that from the—fatal poison."

Henry stood up fast. "Wolfsbane? You fed me _Wolfsbane!_ Sev, you could have killed me!"

"I know that!" he snapped. "I tested it first. On a man with aggravated lycanthropy on the last full moon. He survived—unfortunately."

"Aggravated?" Henry held up his slender, bestial hands for Severus's inspection. "You mean, there's someone else like this?"

"No. He's different. He's still limited to the three nights, but"—Severus's eyes went glassy and his voice dropped—"the Were, it's is enormous. Twice the size it should be."

Henry's eyes narrowed. "This big Were, is he the one that almost—" His words died when Severus drew his wand.

"I'm envenerating the boy now," he stated coldly. "Stay here. When I get back, we're going to talk about what you've done."

The words were supposed to be hard and mortifying for Henry, but the partially transformed Were only smiled toothily. "Yea, we'll talk—thank you, Brother." Severus swooped out of the kitchen without a word, and Henry turned to sit back down and try to finish his cocoa. He stopped, though, and snickered when he caught sight of Nibble the owl. She had fallen off the door out of shock and lay splayed out on the floor, unconscious.

"_Hallelujah,"_ he murmured for more reasons than one and carefully wrapped his claws around his mug.


	7. Lemon Drop?

Severus padded into the living room towards the boy, thinking it would have been much easier if Fenrir Albtraum Svartálfar had turned out to be his nephew. There would have been fewer problems. He wouldn't have to worry about keeping Henry out of the Fenrir's sight, or worry that Fenrir would awaken thinking he four years old. No, there just would have been the awkward, _'Hello, I'm your father's magical half-brother. For the next seven years I'll be your Potions Professor at a bizarre, homicidal boarding school. Oh, and I need to know: has your Da ever bitten you?'_

He sighed as he stopped before the chair. The child laid in it was frightfully small. Severus doubted he was nine years old, let alone eleven. The professor frowned. Why had the school chosen him—and, come to think of it, why was it being so bitching adamant that he come? Severus seemed to recall an era where a series of Slytherin headmasters had managed to keep most Muggleborn students out of the castle for over a century. Why hadn't stairwells tried to grind _their_ bones to dust?

The boy began to tremble. A nightmare. Severus raised his wand. _"Envenerate."_

Fenrir's eyes slid open, and he breathed raggedly, as though he had been underwater for a long time. He shook his head softly, and looked around in a confused way. Severus came into his bleary view, and he yelped, eyes snapping open. He shrank away until he was pressed up against the chair back. "Wh—Who are you?" he stammered.

'_Dark hair, pale skin, slender hands, stuttering voice, an abject terror of people—is Henry absolutely certain this boy isn't his son?'_ Severus bit back the accompanying smile to that thought and replied, "I'm Henry's—the man you're staying with, do you remember him? Yes? I'm Henry's half-brother. He called me in when you blacked out without warning. Tell me the last thing you remember."

"I—" Fenrir paused and put a hand to his head. "I was on the porch. This owl was yelling at me, saying I had to Hogwarts or she'd eat me."

As Severus's brows snapped together with worry, a chuckle came from around the corner. "Oh, yes. The boy can speak to owls, Sev. Translate for them too."

"Henry?" Fenrir called, his neck craning.

"Stay there, kid," Henry said. "Let Sev make sure you're all right."

Severus waved two fingers to the side. "Look at me, Fenrir—" he stopped as he felt Henry stiffen.

"H—his name is F—Fen—r—rir?" his brother choked, sounding of anguish and old fear.

The boy turned about, one hand resting on the chair arm. He said, "Henry? You sound strange," and then vaulted over the chair arm before Severus could stop him. He turned the corner of the room, and then jerked back when he caught sight of a bestial man standing in the doorway to the kitchen. The man all but yelped. Severus's hand curled around his wand. The word _Obliviate _was on his tongue despite his loathing of memory charms.

Fenrir stared at the half-man with eyes large, round, and bulging; he could have been mistaken for a House Elf. He watched the creature before him put a furred, slender hand over its face, which was already obscured by a curtain of black, scraggly hair. "Henry?" the boy asked, aghast.

"Didn't want you to see me like this," the Were sighed. "Didn't want you to know. That's why I"—he paused then, as if belatedly remembering something—"You should just go. Sev will take you to Hogwarts; he teaches there; he can—"

Fenrir asked, "What are you?"

Henry looked up. Some of his hair fell away, revealing a short, lupine snout that jutted from his mostly hairless face. His yellow eyes looked away. "I'm a Werewolf, kid," he growled softly with self-hate. "Ugliest bastard creature on the face of the planet."

The boy cocked his head, looking Henry up and down. "You've _obviously_ never seen a House Elf before."

Severus, who had come up behind the boy, bowed his head in mirth as he bit back a laugh. Henry only looked confused. "House Elves are wizards' servants," Severus patiently explained to his Muggleborn half-brother. "And the boy's right. They're downright ugly. Like mummified heads with bodies attached and large, wrinkled ears."

Fenrir, for unknown reasons, pulled at one of the ears hidden by his hair. "W—They make you look like a cute puppy," he said, though.

For some reason, this soothed Henry. "S—so, you're not afraid of me?" he asked.

Fenrir told him point blank, "Henry, I'm afraid of everything," forcing Severus to bite back the umpteenth smile. "But there's things lots more frightening than you, like"—he stopped, preferring not to use Narcissa Malfoy spooning as an example—"well, let's just say I have perspective. And besides, I like you," he added. "You're the first human to ever to be nice to me." Then he froze, realizing what he'd just said. He had called Henry a human, implying that he, little Fen of the Malfoy House Elves, was _not _human.

Henry took his words a completely different way, though. Looking at his monstrous hands, he stammered, "He—he called me human."

Severus pinched the bridge of his nose. The moment had officially become too poignant for him to stand. "You, go to bed," he ordered, pointing at Fenrir, "And you, go out and eat something before your metabolism turns on you."

Henry turned on him. "And you?"

Severus couldn't help his pained look as he reached into a pocket of his robes, pulled out a thick wad of rolled parchments, and declared, "Me, I have papers to fail."

XXX

The night wore on as Severus blearily reviewed the last few Potions essays. The owl had woken and picked herself up off the floor, shaking her head violently. She had swooped out of the house hours ago, just missing Henry as he came back in. The Were had nodded to Severus, ignorant of his blood-slicked muzzle, and stumbled off to bed. The boy curled up in the living room had gone through a round of nightmares before settling down to more peaceful sleep.

All in all, it was very similar to the all-nighters he pulled grading written homework in the Slytherin Common Room—only there weren't any couples trying to sneak past him. He tried not to think about what the students would be getting up to without him. He also prayed that, three months from now, he wouldn't have quartets of parents demanding to know _'how could he let this happen; he was supposed to watch over them; did he have any idea how many years of careful planning they had put into marriage alliances, only for him to ruin them by letting their children get pregnant!'_ But of course, that wouldn't be half so bad as _'I don't care if your daughter got knocked up; my baby girl is pregnant, and that boy is going to marry her—_then the next party's rant—_now wait a minute, our family has more honor to lose over this mess than yours could ever dream of—_and then both families in tandem—_Professor Snape, how could you do this to our daughters_—as a Slytherin boy, sitting very timidly in the corner went, _'Meep!'_

Severus's quill had begun to drip ink on a Hufflepuff 5th year's essay. He sighed and pushed the scroll aside.

XXX

Albus Dumbledore looked up from his midnight snack of lemon drops as his fireplace roared to life with green flame. Severus Snape's haggard face appeared, said _'I found Svartálfar—and Albus, while I'm gone, could you please keep the Slytherin genders _separate_?'_ and then winked out.

The headmaster smiled and held out a bowl of candy to the Slytherin students locked in his office. The boys and girls were sitting very far apart with red faces, trying to pretend they had absolutely no idea what the opposite gender was.

Dumbledore's eyes twinkled as another surprised, levitating couple zoomed into the room, plunked down into waiting chairs, and turned around just in time to see two mismatched socks disappear down the stairwell, skipping. Blinking, the dazed pair turned back to face front.

"Lemon drop?"

* * *

…**Um, sorry, I know it's short (AGAIN), but I just have to end it there. Seriously though, anything else I write would just pale in comparison to the magnificence of the words _"Lemon Drop."_ **


	8. Guardian

**Whoever put this story in the "Snape Loving Posse" C2, thank you. It was one of the few bits of happiness I was able to glean out of the misery of the last few weeks. **

**I can't do Review Responses in the footnotes anymore, but I'm going to give that "reply" hyperlink thing a try.**

**Sorry for shortness.**

* * *

Severus threw aside the last dratted essay when Fen stumbled into the kitchen. The child was rumpled, glassy-eyed, and nowhere near half-awake. His wild curls were dark thunderbolts and stormy cloud wisps coming off his scalp from all angles. He looked inhuman.

Severus watched the boy dip into a counter cabinet for a frying pan. The pan's handle slipped from his grasp and clanged on the floor. He jerked awake a bit at the noise, but his eyelids sealed themselves shut again in seconds. Asleep on his feet, the boy bent down to retrieve the fallen pan.

Severus got to him first.

Fen opened his eyes to glance at the man's hand around his wrist. The sharp words, "Why are you awake? Go back to sleep," fell on deaf ears. He reached for the pan with his free hand. There was a sigh, and then he was lifted into the air.

XXX

As the Severus strode out of the kitchen with Fen, the boy mumbled into his shoulder, "But I have to…have to, or he'll…" The words trailed off there, and the young Svartálfar was only begging to be let go in his dreams. He snuggled into the reclining chair when laid there and didn't stir again.

Severus stared down at him for a time. _'I have to or he'll…'_ He hated that phrase. Too many children whispered it about their fathers. _'I have to, or he'll hurt, or he'll kill.'_ He gripped his forearm lightly. _'Or he'll know.'_ He sighed and gently wrapped a blanket around Fen's shoulders.

He turned to head back into the kitchen, and stopped with a start. That brown barn owl was perched on the kitchen table, staring at him. He ignored the creature and read the time off a small pocket watch. Not even four in the morning. "Those essays went quickly," he murmured and nonchalantly pocketed the watch. The owl had her head cocked now, with an all-too-human expression of bemusement on her feathered face.

He glared back at her. "Not a word. Not one word."

"_Hooh," _she hooted cheekily.

XXX

Hours later, Severus was knocked out of his exhausted stupor by two tentative hands on his shoulders and the smell of something mouthwatering. He lifted his head up off the wood grain of the kitchen table and blinked as a plate laden with food was shoved under his nose. He turned to look at Henry, whose hands were still on his shoulders. "When did you learn how to cook?"

"Wasn't me. Th—the boy," he was told.

He glanced sharply at Fen. The boy stood uncertainly at the other side of the table, holding a plate that had perhaps one fourth as much food as the other two. Severus took that plate away and shoved a more laden one at him. "Since you've used up so much of my brother's food, you can be the one to make sure it doesn't go to waste," he said, voice acidic.

Fen stared down at the plate on the table. "But, sir—"

Severus arched a brow, and the boy clammed up instantly. "Sit," he ordered and to the chair across the table from him. "Eat."

The boy didn't need to be told twice, sadly. In a more perfect world, there would have been a flash of willfulness in the child's eyes. Instead Severus had spied that familiar, hollow look of meekness and desperate hunger. He was no stranger to underfed, over-mannered children. Pureblood Wizarding families tended to raise their young that way—though to tell the truth, underfeeding was much more common with girls.

He glanced up and bit back a sigh. The boy had had seated himself but had yet to eat anything. Manners. Severus took a quick, perfunctory bite of food, then turned to his older brother. "Would you mind eating outside?" he asked Henry as Fen started to ravenously inhale the contents of his plate. "We"—he nodded towards the boy—"need to talk." "Eat," he added, when the sounds of food disappearing down a small throat suddenly stopped.

Without a word, Henry picked up his plate and walked out the door to eat on the porch. Severus stared after him. His half-brother fell firmly in the category of over-mannered child. He closed his eyes.

"There a few things you need to understand, Mr. Svartálfar," he began and felt Fen glance up at him. "First: I do not like children."

Somewhere, somehow, an owl snorted.

He ignored the sound and went on. "Second of all, your enrollment at Hogwarts in the middle of the term is an painful inconvenience, particularly for me." He did not mention homicidal staircases. "I have today to arrange your enrollment fees, supplies purchasing, and immediate transportation to Hogwarts School. To do this, I need to know one thing. I don't care if this is a sore subject for you. If you don't tell me, I will use your blood to thicken my potions."

Fen paled considerably at that.

Severus pinned him with a look and asked, "Who is your legal guardian?"

XXX

Fen's thoughts had fallen into a dizzily spinning arc of doom. His legal guardian? What did that even mean!

His parents? He didn't have those.

The people who took care of him? The House Elves couldn't keep him safe anymore.

The person who owned him according to the law? That would be Lucius Malfoy, but Hell, he couldn't say _that_. He blinked, remembering he had been freed. That was why he was in this mess. So Malfoy didn't own him anymore. That was one bright note in the funeral song of his life.

"Don't have a guardian, sir," he mumbled at last, somewhat relieved.

Henry's brother lifted an eyebrow dangerously, not pleased at his answer. "I keep a vial of truth potion on me at all times," the man said. "I should warn you, the taste is vile—though mixing in half a cup of your blood _might_ make it bearable."

Fen gulped. "What—what's a legal guardian, exactly?" he asked. "Sir."

The man looked at him oddly. After a time, he answered, "Whoever the Ministry says is responsible for your care."

Fen nodded. "Right. …Don't have someone like that, Sir."

He watched the Hogwarts teacher pinch the bridge of his nose. "Are your parents alive?" he was asked after a long moment.

"Don't know, Sir."

"Who takes care of you, then?"

"No one, Sir. …Well, Henry—"

"—he doesn't count. Someone had to take care of you, Svartálfar. Who?"

Fen looked away and said nothing for a time. Finally: "Do I have to answer? Sir?"

XXX

Severus truly wished he wasn't bluffing about the truth potion. He didn't have any on his person, only a few calming potions and a sturdy bottle of good old Muggle-fashioned napalm that would explode when shattered. He wanted to use both at the moment, but what he really wanted was a nice, cool vial of Veritaserum to cram down the boy's throat.

"Do I have to answer, Sir?"

He put the acid into his voice that he normally reserved for Gryffindors. "If you want to live."

"Sir?" the boy gulped.

"Yes?"

"I think I'd rather die."


	9. Calm

**The Good News:** I've been typing up a storm.  
**The Bad News:** I've been typing up dense legal documents for my parents' architectural firm. (…ugh, so…boring)

**Good News:** I'm being paid well over the minimum hourly wage!  
**Bad News:** I've had almost no time to write _Elfin_! (Grrr)

**Good:** Here's Chapter 9!  
**Bad:** It's Short! (sorry…again)

* * *

Elfin

_by_**  
**_Bone White Butterfly_

"Calm"

* * *

Severus stood up sharply, his temper snapped. Fen slumped. "I can't tell you," the boy whispered miserably and braced himself.

Braced himself.

Severus looked down at his hands, which he had slammed down on the table. Rage and frustration boiled within him, threatening to spill out. His fingers curled into the palms.

XXX

Henry swiveled his head to watch his brother fly out the house, snap the door shut, and glare up at the porch roof. A clumsily clutched fork of egg hovered dangerously near his ear. An amused smirk stretched across his face, trying to reach the egg.

Severus, still craning his neck skyward and now muttering about a Gryffindor Jr., began to pat down his robes in a desperate sort of way. One of Henry's aquiline brows rose when he freed a stoppered glass vial from its pocket prison. The man paid no attention and swigged fatalistically.

A sniff was heard. "Whiskey?"

He sent the werewolf a withering look. "Calming potion."

The other eyebrow rose.

"—Laced with Firewhiskey," he added and upended the vial. "It adds to the potency." He pocketed the empty container and sagged against the door. He let his eyes fall shut as he felt the acid build-up in his mind neutralize.

"He won't tell you who raised him, Sev."

One eye sprang open. It saw Henry sitting on an old wooden chair, his breakfast sitting forgotten on his knees. The man was staring blankly at an old shed nestled in the tree line. It was an imposing structure, built too large and too sturdily. It hadn't been built to hold mere gardening tools.

Severus's eyes clouded. "Henry."

Henry never looked away from the dark shed. "It won't do you any good," he pressed. "Stop asking the boy about who raised him."

Severus's brows furrowed, and he opened his mouth, only to say nothing. Instead, his eyes clicked back to the shed. The heavy wood door was barricaded shut from the outside. He dropped his gaze. "This isn't the same, Henry," he sighed.

"It isn't," his brother agreed. "He got away."

"Henry, for all we know, his foster parents had a row and he overreacted and ran away. You're mistaking a meek child for an abused one."

Henry's neck stiffened. "And what makes a meek child, Sev? Do you think they're just born that way, afraid of every person they meet? You weren't born afraid of anything. Hot stoves, staircases, it was all an adventure. Pain taught you to be scared." His tone of voice cracked. "He's scared of the people he's running from, Sev."

Severus came forward and squeezed his brother's shoulder. "It isn't the same," he said, softer than should have been possible for him. The man didn't respond. Severus turned to walk back into the house, only to find his hand trapped by a relentless grip. He looked back. "Henry?"

Henry tightened his hold.

Severus winced. "Henry."

"He's scared if he tells you who they are, you'll make him go back. And even if you don't, maybe this Ministry of yours will. I won't let that happen. Sev, we may be family, but if that boy ever has to go back to the people who hurt him—I'll eat you."

Henry let go of Severus. His brother stared at him, cradling one half-crushed hand. His blank gaze stayed on the shed's barricaded door.

Severus glanced at the shed as well. His gaze darkened. "Burn it down," he snapped and stalked back inside.

Henry continued to grimly stare ahead. "As soon as He's chained up inside," he muttered. His hand absently caressed a bulging pocket, in which a pouch of memory-killing powder rested. The magic forgetfulness was tried and true. The boy had forgotten the horrors of the bloodied wooden prison. Henry could too. If he wanted, he could use the powder to banish the cruel claw marks raked across his mind. He could be ten years old again. He could be innocent again—after he murdered the man who raised him.

The light shifted, plunging the old shed into deeper shadow.

XXX

When Severus came into the kitchen, Fen jerked his head up. One wide hazel eye seemed to pop out of the boy's hairline. Severus glared at him as he tried to shake the pain out of his hand. "I won't hurt you, boy," he snapped at last.

He let his gaze fall in the quiet moment that followed. He saw the table that had been his impromptu pillow for two hours. At one corner, a stack of failed essays had been shuffled into some sort of order. There were two plates. The one before his empty chair was all but undisturbed. The boy's was polished clean. It was impossible to tell that there had once been food on it.

Severus came forward, picked up his plate, and slid its contents onto Fen's demolished one. "Eat," he said and turned to his schoolwork. The pile of parchments was quickly rolled up and secured with a bit of ribbon. The quill went into a small case and the bottle of ink was wrung shut even tighter. "We will be leaving shortly." He started going through his pockets in search of a map of the Forbidden Forest.

The apparating potion had burned out of his system hours ago. Now he needed to get clear of the Forest to apparate. That meant a long hike with a wand at the ready. He would have asked Henry to act as a guide, but there wasn't much chance of that now. He rolled out the joints in his right hand as the left continued to search. His eyes smoldered. The werewolf had picked a hell of time to learn he had teeth.

He stopped as he realized he had gone through the same pocket for the third time. His lips thinned. In his rush, he hadn't taken the map from Dumbledore.

He turned and looked from the boy's barren plate to the living room. "Svartálfar, that owl is school property," he said. "Roust it out before my brother decides he wants poultry for lunch."

There was an indignant screech from the recesses of the house. Fen gulped but stood and walked a death row march into the living room.

Severus watched him go. Then, slowly, his gaze moved to consider the door that led out to the porch. He sighed. His eyes went skyward as he started a walk similar to Fen's. This was going to be painful.

XXX

Severus took in a breath. "Henry," he called, trying to pull the man from his knife-edged meditations. "Henry, I need you to lead us out of the Forest."

Henry didn't look up. "Just apparate."

"I can't," he said through his teeth, using up a lifetime's supply of reluctance with two words. A thrashing noise started inside the house. Severus lowered his voice to speak under it. "It's impossible to apparate in or out of the Forest. Some ancient enchantment."

"But you"—Henry gestured towards the living room, where Severus had apparated in last night. His fingers snapped when words failed him.

Severus shook his head. "I bent the rules, went around them."

Henry's head jerked up a bit. "Then why don't you bend the rules for the boy?"

Severus bit back a groan. He had seen that coming. "I can't gift drop him on the school, Henry," he tried to explain. "His guardian needs to give him permission to come. Then there's fees, supplies to buy—and in his case clothes." The ruckus inside the house suddenly stopped. "Someone has to pay for all of that. Henry,"—his brows rose, lengthening his look of disbelief—"Henry are you—"

Henry was stonewalling him.

XXX

Severus stormed back into the kitchen. Fen was there, looking particularly disheveled. The owl didn't look much better, but her beak had somehow transfigured itself into a victorious smirk. Severus barely acknowledged them as he pulled a vial from his pocket and drank deep. After the initial kick, the liquid turned cool. His taut muscles relaxed, and the boiling inside reduced to an annoyed simmer. He swept back outside, shutting the door behind him.

XXX

With his eyes rolled towards the heavens, he told Henry, "The Ministry pays for the schooling of orphans. I swear—on the grave of our Father—that I will register the boy as a ward of the Ministry until I can prove—to your satisfaction—that his guardian is not an abusive, flesh-eating monster."

"There's a small Muggle town to the northeast," Henry said simply. "Hour's walk. Just fields along the forest edge; you can apparate there."

Sharply, Severus replied, "Thank you," and swept back inside.

XXX

There, he blinked at the sight before him. "Svartálfar, why is that bird nesting atop your head?

* * *

**The chapter sorta went like this: _Poor Sev, poor Fen, poor Sev, whoa…Henry, poor Sev, poor Sev, and…go Nibble! _**

**Yep, my mission in life is to frazzle Snape out of his sanity, with much fun and semi-angst along the way.**


	10. Not Your Problem

**Yay! I broke the Criminally-Short-Chapter Curse. It's a decent length!

* * *

**

"_Not Your Problem"

* * *

_

Fen sat on a patch of browned grass. His arms wrapped around his knees. The overlarge sleeves hid his hands inside white cuffs. He looked up at Henry's brother in an attempt to ignore Nibble's unwavering glare in his direction.

The professor stood in a bright patch of sun. His eyes were closed, as though he were enjoying a rare opportunity. The owl had abandoned her perch on Fen's head for one atop a chair deep in the shadows of the porch. She didn't stay there long. When Henry walked out the door hefting the weapon that Fen thought was an enormous wand, she launched into the air, screeching. The Were watched her go, of half a mind to take a shot at her. But something—who knew what—saved her, and he slipped his head and arm through the sturdy strap instead. As he arranged the weapon comfortably behind his back, Severus eyed it disdainfully.

Henry glanced up to see his brother draw a wand and say, "That thing will be useless against anything we come across in the Forest. It's only good for killing Muggles."

He merely nodded at the words and walked into the tree line, not waiting for the wizard, owl, and boy to scramble after.

XXX

Their location was a secret known only to one. There was no path to follow, only Henry as he strode through fallen leaves.

The underbelly of the forest, normally an impregnable darkness, was now riddled with tiny cracks of light. The canopy shivered at a hiss of autumn wind. The shriveled leaves of a dead branch fled in a trembling formation. A beam of fractured light snaked through the resulting gap to strike at Severus Snape. His dark robes flared, a deep, complex green. His slick black hair whipped back, hinting at rich brown. Then the wind died, and he stepped from the light, reentering the forest's monochrome gloom.

For an hour, Fen had walked and watched Henry's brother pass in and out of darkness, fluidly shifting to match in the uncomfortable silence. It came as a surprise, then, when the professor stopped at the edge of a leafy patch of invading sunlight and threw a look back at him. Light played over the man's face. Sinister shadows fled from harsh light, which then softened, only for the obscuring dim to return. Then he turned back to his brother's receding form and started after it.

Fen was left with no idea of what the look had meant. The elfin boy stood, staring, for a full minute. Then he took a tentative step back. An enraged hoot killed any plans in that direction, and he dashed forward to catch up with the humans before Nibble could tackle and eat him. He could feel the owl's glare as she swooped through the shifting light behind him. Unfortunately, she was onto his plan to lag behind, vanish, and avoid this Hogwarts disaster altogether. And as she had so calmly informed him from her perch atop his head an hour ago, she was not letting him out of talons' reach until she saw him to the castle. The incisions in his scalp were a rather unpleasant reminder of that.

Nibble's hooted death threats ended once Fen was walking in front of Severus. That did something for his nerves. Only now escape was impossible, and he felt two pairs of eyes at his back. Uneasy, he played with the dark curls that hid his ears, ensuring that the points were hidden beneath a wild mop of hair.

Henry strode on ahead, mindless of the people behind him. He was unused to leading. Instead, he walked towards his destination at his normal pace. It should have been too fast for Fen to keep up with, but the boy seemed used to trailing after inconsiderate adults with legs twice the length of his.

Watching Fen dart after the Were, Severus was inexplicably reminded of a House Elf. Perhaps it was the boy's clothes. They bore an uncanny resemblance a House Elf's skin, being several sizes too large for his small size and hopelessly wrinkled. It also could have been the wide fearful eyes, the too-thin limbs, or the strange need to constantly cook and clean.

The man's lips thinned. In the back of his mind, his forced promise to make the boy a ward of the Ministry was sounding better every minute. At the forefront, though, was the assertion that Fenrir Albtraum Svartálfar wasn't his problem—and never would be. The boy was either destined to become a Hufflepuff or Longbottom's heir.

'_Merlin save me if it's the latter.'_

XXX

Severus pocketed his wand when they reached the edge of the forest.

Henry slung his weapon off his back and readied it. "Put that back," he said when the wand reappeared. "An' take off your outer robes. Hang them over one arm. The rest of you's Muggle enough. Boy looks fine." He sat and returned to his work. He looked up a minute later to find his brother had done nothing. His face darkened. He frowned and pointed through the trees. "First of all, when you go to a place, you look the part. That's a Muggle settlement. Second…" he paused and spared a glance at Fen.

"They should be asleep at this hour," he sighed. "But I'd rather not take that chance." He tugged on the weapon. It made a dangerous sound.

The wizard glanced up at the noonday sun. "Since when are Muggles nocturnal?" He turned his attentions to his brother. "And if you want to be inconspicuous, a gun—"

"This is inconspicuous," Henry cut in, raising the rifle, "for them." He swung the weapon around and used it to point at the settlement. "You see that last row of fields before the town gets dense? You have to get that close before apparition works."

"And how would you know that?"

He didn't answer. Instead, he said, "Just follow me and keep moving." He stood and strode out of the trees, the gun lowered but ready. "Keep the boy close," he added.

Severus stared at Henry's back a moment. Then he pressed his folded robe into Fen's arms. "Hold this." He missed the boy's reaction to being handed clothes as he withdrew his wand and slid it down one shirtsleeve. He fisted that hand, trapping the wand tip between two fingers. It didn't work so well as a sheath, but it would work. With his free hand, he took Fen by the shoulder and steered him out of the trees after Henry.

His brother's wariness seemed unfounded as they followed the Were across a reaped field. In spite of the high sun, everything looked asleep. The only sound Severus could hear was their crunch footsteps as they tread on the field's dry stubble.

Henry moved quickly in a straight line. Severus was hard pressed to keep up; he didn't know how Fen managed. He did become accustomed to the pace, though, and began to study his surroundings. The fields were in the flat area of a large depression that the forest ringed. The grade was rather shallow where they had exited the trees, but it grew steeper further west. By the time the fields ended and the town began, the area was loomed over by two veritable cliffs. The flat area bottlenecked as it went west, and the town was the cork.

Severus began to feel uneasy.

He didn't notice the structure wedged in between two fields until they were nearly on top it. The reason why was obvious. It was shorter than he was tall, and was only about that wide. He was reminded of a chicken coop, only it was built far too sturdily. The thick, padlocked door suggested a tool shed for important equipment, but the structure was too short for a person to get in and out without stooping or crawling. When he neared it, he half-heard an odd, hiccupping sound. He frowned.

"Henry?" Fen asked, tugging one ear uncomfortably. "What's in that shed?"

Screams rent the air.

The heavy door started to rattle frantically. Fen was suddenly welded to the side of Severus that was furthest from the shed. The boy winced at every shriek for help.

Henry whirled. He saw Severus with his wand out, halfway through the motions to blast the shed's door open. He wrenched his brother's arm down. "Put that away and keep going," he said. Severus escaped his grasp only to be caught again. Henry pinned him with his eyes for good measure. "This is not your problem," he asserted, clipping each word.

Severus, though, had decided that it was. _"What is this!" _he hissed.

Henry sagged. He had wanted to avoid this, to take a different route, but the next closest place to safely exit the forest without a parachute was six hours to the south. Six hours at his normal pace, and that was assuming the Redcaps didn't hold him up. He sighed. With a child in tow, it wasn't even an option to go through Redcap territory. And the northern exit was too far; it would take days of steady running. That only left the town. Gripping the rifle, he scanned the row of houses closest to the fields for movement.

This would have been so much easier if he and the town alpha were on speaking terms.

His brother was glaring at him. "This is Fenr—Fe—_His_ legacy," he sighed at last. "The town, these people; they're all Weres."

As Severus's eyes widened, he pointed at the shed, where the girl's screams for help had dwindled to teary mumbles. She wouldn't tell; she just wanted to go home. "She's new." He gestured with the gun. "Can we please move? There's nothing you can do for her. The town will take care of her—for the rest of her life. I don't know how else to reassure you, just move." He turned and walked west, leaving Severus and Fen to follow.

XXX

"Here." Henry knelt in the tall grasses of a field that had been allowed to lie fallow. His eyes never left darkened homes in the near distance. "The forest stops here up on those ridges; you can apparate here." He paused, then called, "Fe—Boy? I'm sorry about that back there. But you have to realize, that girl, she's…sick. The symptoms haven't shown yet, though, an' she doesn't want to believe it."

As Henry spoke to Fen, Severus looked down at his rumpled, sweat-stained clothes. With a sigh, he took his robe back from Fen, donned it, and then dropped down low to the ground. Under the cover of grasses, he ran his wand over his attire, muttering. Wrinkles straightened out, mud disappeared, and a fresh scent replaced the lived-in one. His skin was stripped of dust and sweat, and his hair straightened. Experience had taught him not to try spelling his hair clean.

He flicked the wand at Fen next. The boy's clothes smartened up, and smudges of dirt disappeared from his neck, but the deranged tangle of hair atop his head didn't budge.

Severus's brows furrowed.

"When she realizes she's infectious…that it's safer for everyone if she stays here with the others, she'll move into town nights _and_ days…and live a normal life." Henry closed his eyes when he said normal. "Do you understand?"

Without warning, Fen wrapped his arms around Henry's neck.

XXX

"_Can I please stay with you?"_ Fen whispered the desperate words into Henry's ear, low, so Nibble and the Potions professor couldn't hear. _"Please?"_ This was his last chance to escape. Unabashedly, he plucked at the man's heartstrings, using the argument he had overheard the brothers having about him. _"Please, he's going to make me go back to…Him." _He choked on the last word, having dredged up every dark memory he could to taint his voice with emotion.

Severus noticed Henry's sudden stricken look. "We need to be leaving," he said quickly and reached a hand out towards the boy. Fen disentangled from the Were only partially, his fingers knotting behind the man's neck. Henry's breath went uneven. He pulled the boy towards him and felt the small arms reassert their grip.

Severus's eyes narrowed at the look on Henry's face. "I swore," the man growled. "On our father. Isn't that enough for you?"

Henry stared up at Severus. His grip on the boy slackened. Then he felt tears bleed through his shirt. They burned him worse than silver ever had. He realized he was shaking his head and had been for some time. "No," he said simply. Fen relaxed slightly in his embrace. He closed his eyes.

"Henry," Severus's voice pleaded before taking on a harsher note. "You know you can't keep him. Even if it was legal, it's not safe for him here. You said it yourself; this entire town's infected with lycanthropy. He'd be the only human for miles; they would swarm him on Full Moons. Do you want to be responsible for his death? _For that death?_" Henry's eyes snapped open.

The two humans stared at each other, their eyes filled with memories of monstrous, slavering jaws. There was silence for a full minute before Henry bowed his head and pulled a trembling Fen off of him. Severus stepped forward and gripped the boy's shoulders. A flash of brown swooped down from the sky. Fen raised an arm quickly to protect his head from the owl's talons. Nibble landed on the arm instead. She turned her head nearly a full half-turn at him and smirked, _'Nice try.'_

Fen stiffened and almost missed Henry's farewell. "Bye," he replied emotionlessly. Then he closed his eyes and waited for the professor to apparate him to his doom.

XXX

The hands trapping his shoulders gripped him tight right before the ground fell out from under his feet. Then it reappeared with a thud, and the hands were the only thing that kept him upright. In a flurry of motion, Nibble abandoned his arm for the sky, and his captor led him forward. He kept his eyes closed as they walked, being of the opinion that what he didn't see couldn't hurt him.

"_Severus?"_

Fen froze even before the professor's feet ground to a halt. It couldn't be. It just couldn't. He opened his eyes to prove his ears wrong. His face fell slack.

Severus smiled. "Lucius," he greeted.

* * *

…**Well. The next scene should prove interesting. **


	11. Lucius

As I begin this chapter, my mother and I are at the beginning of a six hour trip to Indiana that we'll be accomplishing in five, or else. Welcome to the world of college visits, my friends. Well. The good news for you is that I have a laptop, and nothing else to do but write _Elfin _chapters for you.

—

Sigh. This chapter was supposed to be funny, I know. But I just didn't have it in me. Oh. And that reminds me…

Lost: _Funny Bone. If found, please contact Bone White Butterfly. _

—

I have an introduction: Say hi to my official fic-tester, everybody. Her pen name is Alliriyan; I call her "Mell." Every _Elfin_ chapter gets okayed by her before you see it. Make friends with her. She's the girl who knows my address and can hop a plane to come kill me for you if I abandon this story.

_Mell:_** _If she abandons this story, I am gonna hunt down all the reviewers from her last pen name, and lead a spamming crusade with their (and your) help. She says some of them are after her blood… : )_**

**_I wish I could hop on a plane to America…England's so cold…_**

ME: "…gulp"

_Mell: _**I get to read _Elfin_ first! Ner ner! **

ME: sigh...

* * *

Lucius

* * *

Severus led Fen off the apparition circle. The stone's glow died as they cleared. Only a moment passed before it flared garnet again and a witch appeared upon it, wreathed in smoky shadow. Her apparition trail wound into the ice blue sky and mingled with the magical haze that encircled the Ministry and coiled towards heaven. Severus kept a hard grip on his charge's shoulder as they moved through the turmoil called the ring of apparition points at the end of the lunch hour. Even on Sunday, the place was a riot of commotion. The only calm of the storm was the courtyard's center. There, he paused and took in the vista of the Ministry grounds as they basked in the noon light. Just beyond the towering miasma, the imposing curved walls of the Wizarding government loomed near as high. 

He felt uneasiness creeping in upon him as he craned to eye the cruelly carved rooftops and caught, he thought, an occasional flickering as a gargoyle shifted a clawed wing. He turned to statue at the courtyard's center, where the witch and wizard smiled down at him kindly with marble teeth. Even statues in this place wore two faces. He eyed a group of wizards in the area whose robes and manner marked them as bureaucrats. His grip on Fen shifted. Some part of him feared that these double dealers would recognize one of their own.

"_Severus?"_

Startled, he looked about, only to find he had already been staring at the speaker for some time.

The lord stepped forward from the group of his fellows. He was a man suited to his surroundings in every respect. His tailored robes complemented the Ministry's dark, imperial walls. His eyes were the color of the sky, a cold blue turned gray by dark, snaking coils of magic. The rest of him could only be described as a pale winter sun.

A wan smile formed on Severus's face. "Lucius," he called.

X X X

"Ah. So it is you," Lucius said gaily, abandoning the arrangement of ministry officials he had been the centerpiece of. "I wasn't sure. You look— It must be the light. I've never seen you in direct light like this before. I can barely recognize you." As Severus shifted, he laughed.

The professor replied in a restrained way, "Yes, well I'm afraid I don't get near enough sun, Lucius. And how is Narcissa?"

"Never more lovely," he was assured. "So what brings you to the Ministry?" Lucius's eyes swept over Fen and flickered before returning to Severus without a word.

"School business," Severus said.

"Ah. And what business does Slytherin house have with the Ministry?"

"None."

Lucius gave Fen a closer, more clinical look. The boy didn't notice, too busy staring straight ahead at a creature who stooped near the lord's knee. The House Elf had folded her hands. Her eyes were downcast in subservient demureness. The line of her clenched jaw stood out plainly in her skeletal face.

Impy.

"What is this school business, then?"

"A new student."

Impy's eyelids snapped back. Impossible, her eyes said. Impossible as there being two suns—blue suns—in eternal eclipse.

Several feet above the silent denial, Lucius looked amused. "In the middle of the term?"

"Yes."

"_Him?"_ Fen was appraised once again after the nod. "But he's far too young. Has the school gone mad?"

Severus was very tempted to answer that question.

"Who is the boy, then?" the lord wanted to know.

The boy's gaze darted up into Lucius's calculating eyes before dropping hurriedly. Impy's lips had thinned to the merest of lines.

"We don't know," Severus answered.

Lucius's attention jumped back to the professor. "You don't know? He isn't Muggle stock, is he?"

"He's Wizard kind."

"Pureblood?"

Severus did not ask how he was supposed to know. Instead, he sighed, "It's a possibility. Do you recognize the name Svartálfar?"

Impy's teeth were a sealed wall of enamel. Lucius's head turned to the side slightly. His eyes narrowed, as though scanning thousands of family trees from memory. "I've heard it, but…" The aristocratic lips smiled helplessly. "I can't place it. It's not native British. Of the Continent, perhaps."

"Foreign?" Severus frowned. "Perhaps," he agreed. "There is an odd accent I can't quite place."

Beneath the notice of the two men, a House Elf arched a blonde eyebrow surreptitiously at the subject of the conversation. The boy was standing quite frozen. It took effort to turn his palms outwards and offer the merest suggestion of a helpless shrug. Impy subsided. Fen's gesture hadn't been the same as squeaking, _'Hows the Hell is Little Fen supposeds to control his accents!'_ but she got the gist.

Erstwhile, Severus had lowered his voice. _"You're acting far too cheerful, Lucius. Would you care to explain your suddenly sunny disposition?"_

The lord glanced down at Impy, acknowledging her existence for the barest of moments. In that space of time, his face lengthened into a blade of malice. Then he returned his attention to Severus, and it seemed impossible for such an expression to ever have marred such a cheerful countenance. "I'm merely enjoying the weekend and the warm weather,"he confided with a smile. _"I wouldn't be here at all if not for that damned H…"_ He pressed his lips together and rolled out his shoulders, unaware that a House Elf and a small boy had just flinched. "You know, it's not worth talking about on a day like this.

Severus frowned. "I am sorry for the Hippogriff incident."

Lucius froze a moment before smiling thinly. "Yes. Quite," he said, and then chuckled. "Narcissa is still a bit hysteric. I'm afraid she won't sleep until every creature in the Forbidden Forest has been transformed into stuffed animals for the children at Mungo's." He laughed again. "Little witch girls playing tea party with Werewolf dolls stuffed into the chairs; can you imagine?"

Severus didn't laugh, keeping intact the rumor that he had no sense of humor.

Fen remained silent as well. Perhaps the boy's grasp of the English language was weak. It would explain the accent.

Lucius sighed. "Well, I suppose I shouldn't keep you from your business any more than I already have. Give Draco my regards—and Narcissa's, of course." At Severus's nod, he reached forward to clasp the professor's shoulder. "And do come visit us during Yule. Should you manage to escape Hogwarts, that is. That school is a better prison than Azkhaban."

Severus said nothing.

The lord smiled. "Ask Dumbledore for early release on good behavior and come. For Narcissa's sake—and my ears'. If I spend one more holiday season with her bemoaning the lack of intelligent conversation, I'll need to pay Mungo's to reattach them."

Severus finally smiled wryly. It must have been the thought of the holiday season.

Yule.

Elsewhere, a boy felt the senseless pangs of homesickness as he wondered who would sweep up the fallen pine needles now that he was gone. A House Elf looked on with a sympathy that overcame the grotesqueness of her face. The lord let his hand fall to his side and walked away but called over his shoulder, "Come. Severus Snape is always welcome in the Malfoy home." He walked on. The House Elf followed him to a stone circle, rigid and silent, wrapped her bony fingers around an unimportant corner of his gray cloak, and allowed herself to be pulled through the vortex of smoke.

Severus sighed and watched the miasma curl into the sky. He was used to Lucius Malfoy's aristocratic brand of pleasantry, but the man had been far too exuberant—and long-winded. He glanced at the Ministry entrance.

"Don't dawdle," he said to Fen and reached with his hand, only to discover it had been resting on the small shoulder the entire time. He looked down at his charge, who was looking up at him. He didn't realize that the boy had been frozen in that exact position, staring at him, ever since Lucius had said his full name. He merely prodded Fen and strode toward the imposing doors, leaving the elfin child to walk dumbly, finally realizing who the man truly was.

"Sev," Henry's brother, was Severus Snape.

One of the Malfoys' friends.

Draco's Godfather.

Hell.

* * *

…**You know? I actually meant to get Severus and Fen _inside_ the Ministry building this chapter. This fic is going to get rather long, I think… **

Well… It's snowing. And snowing… Snowing so hard I can't see twenty feet in front of us on a well-lit highway as we crawl at the speed of 10 miles an hour. …And it was well over 50 degrees Fahrenheit at noon.

What is wrong with this picture?


	12. Afford to Care

Blinks. I'm back. I've been accepted at a University I like, and my dad won't go bankrupt getting me there. There's also been some family trouble, but I'm okay now. So. I **finally** have some time to write again...until late April to early May, when I'm taking all of my Advanced Placement exams...grr.

Thanks for editing the _very _rough draft version, Mell.

* * *

Draco glanced up at the head table during lunch. Professor Snape was absent—for the fifth meal in a row. He glanced around. No one else seemed overly concerned. It wasn't actually all that unusual for Snape to become scarce when the students weren't safely locked away in their classrooms, but at the moment, for Draco, his disappearance was one of many building concerns. Snape hadn't been in the Slytherin common room the night before. Hell. Most of Slytherin hadn't been in the Slytherin common the night before. What was more, Gryffindor's House points were holding steady, and Longbottom wasn't twitching. 

Draco's eyes narrowed.

There was something rotten in the House of Slytherin.

—

Severus led Fen into the small office only by pulling him in by the arm. The child, already unnaturally quiet, seemed to be attempting not to breathe. Already naturally pale, his skin had gone a marble white. For some nebulous and aggravating reason, the boy had become a statue. If not for Severus's physical hold on his elbow, he would have stood stock still in the Ministry hallway. That, or bolted faster than a spooked unicorn. Severus had no illusions about which was more likely. When they were in the office, he shut the door behind them.

A worker glanced up from her small, cluttered desk. "Can I help you?"

Severus nodded back at the young witch. She seemed competent. Odd, seeing as she was only a year or two out of school. He frowned. Though the planes of her face were vaguely familiar, he didn't know her.

The witch seemed to notice Fen for the first time. She smiled. "Hello, dear." She didn't seem particularly surprised when he didn't respond. She only sent Severus a knowing look that he didn't bother to read and pulled a folder from a drawer. "Would you take a seat?" she asked. Two chairs in front of her desk were waved at. Severus led the boy to a chair but preferred to stand with one hand firmly reassuring the boy's shoulder. She opened the folder to reveal a sizable stack of forms. "You realize this isn't the standard procedure," she said.

"This isn't the standard situation," he replied flatly.

She said nothing, but the quill that leapt to attention over the mountain of forms looked rather stiff. At last, she sighed and turned her attention to the boy. "What's your name then, dear?"

Fen looked away.

"Fenrir Albtraum Svartálfar," Severus answered for him

She glanced up. "Is that right?" she asked Fen.

Again silence.

"It was verified through the mail registry."

The quill pen scratched in the name after a reluctant pause. "Who were his guardians?" she asked Severus directly, finally giving up on asking Fen.

"He had none—that I know of."

Scritch.

"Mmm." This time the knowing look was shared. "Where was he found?"

Severus didn't hesitate. "A Squib living on the edge of the Forest bordering the Hogwarts School of Magic found him two days ago. He notified Hogwarts, and the school"—he grimaced—"elected me to go fetch him. Then I discovered the boy wasn't an enrolled student."

"Ah." She had taken out a second quill and was tapping it against her thumb absently. "And you didn't pass him off to a ministry official because…?" Her voice had suddenly chilled, he noticed. Her manner had also turned slightly hostile after he mentioned Hogwarts.

His eyes narrowed. She was a working-class witch, one more than slightly resentful of Hogwarts because she had been taught in a ministry-funded school. However, this begged the question of how a young nobody had managed to bag a Ministry desk job. Severus was under the quite accurate impression that the government only handed out posts to the children of wealthy election campaign donors.

As to her question, he answered, "Unfortunately, according to the school, I must be the one who handles this."

"Even though it goes against standard Ministry procedure?"

He met her gaze evenly. "I'd rather not lose my job." He briefly thought about how many staircases Hogwarts had and silently added, _'or break my neck.'_

She finally sighed. The quill scribbled a quick note. "Just age, then," she muttered. "Eight?"

"Possibly eleven."

She frowned at Fen. Severus reached into one pocket. He handed her the Hogwarts letter. There was a quiet moment as she gently held the envelope in both hands and stared at the remains of the broken seal. Severus suspected that he had just given a childhood dream a bitter fulfillment. The letter was finally set down on the desk reverently. She nodded, and in an instant, her whole manner changed. "Right, then. This"—she stripped off the top sheet of parchment—"isn't glowing, so no one is missing a little boy with his description."

Severus's brow furrowed at this, but he nodded.

"And this"—she signed the next sheet before spinning it around to him—"makes him an official ward of the Ministry. Have him sign the bottom." Without waiting for a response, she began sorting through the stack with a muttered "No…no, no…n—ah. Here. School form. Sign for Hogwarts under Non-Ministry-Supported School." The unspoken _'or I'll kill you'_ was deafening.

Severus blinked at her. She met his gaze—this time heatedly, rather than cool. A few things suddenly fell into place. "You were a Ministry ward," he said flatly.

She nodded, looked at the letter. "I was supposed to go…"

"Your parents went to Hogwarts?"

She shrugged. "I'm a Dubois."

He frowned. Old family. "They had money."

She looked away.

He closed his eyes. Old blood. Slytherin family. The war. Property seizure of suspected dark supporters. Standard Ministry procedure. Of course. One thought nagged him, though. "You tuition wasn't paid for at birth?" The way her eyes snapped to his in confusion gave him a none too vague urge to snap the Ministry's collective neck. Of course her parents had paid. And of course the Ministry had grabbed back the gold with rotund greasy fingers. What was the cost of a year at Hogwarts now, more than the average working family made in a year? The Dubois family had not been a charity case; they would have paid in full.

He bristled, then. It had been a lot of money, but the Ministry had gone too far. Canceling the contract and collecting the gold had only served to hurt Adelle. He blinked. Yes, Adelle. Adelle Dubois. He had attended the gala that celebrated her first bout of accidental magic—the Wizarding equivalent of a debutante's introduction to society. He remembered because it was there that he first saw Voldemort. Of course, back then the wizard had been only a mysterious but charming guest of honor. Severus remembered watching him dance with Adelle, then five. He dropped his gaze. A year later, the little Lady Dubois had vanished and Voldemort had become a terrifying Lord of Death.

By now, Severus had completely forgotten his reason for coming to the little office. Instead, he looked up at Adelle. She had been meant to be his student—in his House. The Ministry had gone too far.

He searched his pockets for a piece of scratch paper. Though a good number of student essays counted, he eventually picked up the envelope from Svartálfar's Hogwarts letter, took the self-inking quill Adelle had handed him earlier, and began to write. As she looked at him confusedly, he told her, "Your name will get you an audience. Give this note to Lord Luc—" He paused and looked at her. She had the smooth, blooming features of youth. In dismay, he watched her perpetually guarded look be crowded out of her eyes as hope slowly crept in. "Lord Adonis Nott," he finished. Nott. Not the best. Nott couldn't get her as much compensation as another Lord, but at least he wouldn't demand…compensation.

After a minute, Adelle took the envelope from him carefully. It was another minute before she realized a small child was staring at both of them. She looked down quickly, and she noticed that Fen hadn't signed the form that would make him a Ministry ward. With a sigh, she leaned forward over the desk and folded his fingers around her quill. "Fenrir, I know you don't like this, but you have to sign the form. It's a way to show the Ministry that you're…levelheaded. Until you sign, they'll always have an eye on you. Signing gives you"—she shrugged—"more freedom."

Despite the incentive, it was still a bit of a surprise when Fen suddenly twisted the quill in his hand into position and, with the same careful, crimped style that one might label a jar, he printed his name.

—

Many forms later, Adelle clapped her hands together. "Well, I think that's everything."

"Not everything."

She glanced up.

Severus gestured to the Hogwarts letter lying abandoned on the desk. "The boy was on Hogwarts' student registry before he became a ward of the Ministry. As Guardian, the Ministry is _required_ to pay for his schooling at Hogwarts or another school of equal caliber—not that there is one," he added, momentarily forgetting his fervent desire to reduce every last brick of the enchanted castle to rubble.

Her eyes narrowed. "I see." She started to rifle through the stack of forms. After the fourth time through, she threw up her hands. "I can't— There's a form for reimbursements. They would use it on birthdays so you could buy yourself a "reasonable" gift." She sent Severus a pitying look. "You'll have to talk to my—er, department head." She pointed in one direction. "The first right, fourth door on your left. …Maybe the boy should stay with me, meanwhile. She's not very good with children."

"Odd that she would choose something so child-oriented for her career, then," he remarked as he stood.

"Yes. Well. I'm sure she has her reasons." She glanced at Fen. "Don't we all?"

He sighed ever so slightly. "Don't we all."

—

Severus didn't need Adelle's directions to find her department head's door. His ears led him there just fine.

"—_Irene's family has always gone to Hogwarts!"_

The feminine voice that replied was both grating and sweet, sickly so. _"Which is lovely, but that child is not your son. And I'm afraid that you two are forcing our hand."_

"…_What are you saying?"_

A throat was cleared loudly. _"I am saying that if you persist with this foolishness and enroll the child in a school for young witches and wizards, you will be putting hundreds of innocents in danger."_

"_Toby is not—"_

"—_If you do this, then you will have proved yourselves to be unfit for guardianship, and the child will be moved to a location where it _will_ be properly contained."_

Another woman's voice entered the fray. _"I don't care what Toby's parents were! My baby—"_

**"—HEM-HEM!"**

Severus gritted his teeth at the sound. It wasn't what aggravated him the most, though. Merlin. This was his third incident of a child being denied access to Hogwarts in twenty-four hours! He turned and glared at his reflection in the brass plaque on the wall. UMBRIDGE, the bold lettering read. Umbridge, like umbrage. The expression on his face described the latter word perfectly. He felt murderous. Hogwarts. Hogwarts! That damned castle was a worse bully than any student it had ever dished out. From hundreds of miles away, from a bloody different isle, it was forcing him into the role of the white knight: partaker of quests, righter of wrongs, defender of all things Hogwarts! He seethed. He all but broke his nose as he savagely pinched the bridge of it. Morganna hex it. Morganna hex it all; he couldn't afford to care!

—

He was starting back towards Adelle's office, planning to adopt Svartálfar on the spot and pay for the boy's school expenses himself, when Umbridge's door banged open and slammed shut again behind him. He turned in time to see tears explode from the eyes of a worn, middle-aged witch. Irene, he supposed.

She noticed his presence and jerked, staring with eyes like a startled doe's.

He tried to scowl, glare, anything. Nothing. He could only stare back at the tiny, bookish woman.

No. Merlin, no. Now, of all times, he couldn't afford to care.


	13. Wing through the Whorls

Nibble had been wheeling aimlessly through the whorls of apparition smoke above the Ministry for more than an hour. True, her feathers were becoming a tad hazy, but she wasn't about to end her favorite childhood game because of that. She remembered the old song. _Wind through the wind, wing through the whorls, weave through, and wallow, wane, whisper, waver, O weave through, wind through, wing through the whorls_. It was too bad that owls were only musical in their heads.

Oh, well.

Wind through the wind… 

—

"—Quidditch? All the boys I knew were crazy about it."

Fen looked down at the hands folded in his lap. Adelle's latest attempt at pleasant conversation petered out. She squirmed in the silence, unnerved by the unnatural lack of chatter. "Candy," she finally declared and began to hunt through her desk drawer. "There's not a child who doesn't love candy. What kind do you like best, Fenrir?"

The boy's eyelids shot up. "You don't need to do that, Lady Dubois."

Adelle's hands froze. She spent a long moment studying the strange little boy before her. Appearances, though, revealed no secrets. At last she said, "I haven't been a lady since I was six years old, Fenrir. The title went with my parents."

"You still have their blood, though. You can't change what you are."

She smiled sadly. "Are you from an old family, Fenrir?'

He went quiet. She redirected the dying conversation quickly. "Well, I'm afraid we humans judge people by their appearances, not by their blood."

"Appearances are important."

"Unfortunately," sighed Adelle. "Sometimes I wish that everyone appeared exactly as they were." She smiled, thinking of a certain Ministry toad.

"I don't."

She glanced sharply at Fen and asked, "Why not?"

He looked back down at his hands, and she wanted to groan, but then he said again: "Appearances are important."

She sat back. She was used to dealing with children who had been forced to grow up fast, but this was a little much. Eleven? Her ears were telling her he was twenty, her eyes only eight. But then appearances were deceiving…

Her thoughts were interrupted when a rather irate—she glanced down at the form he had signed—Severus Snape stalked in through the doorway. "Here." He laid on her desk a parchment roughly the size of a postcard. He glared at it and added with a sneer, "In her rush to help me, she _somehow_ neglected to authorize it with her signature and the Ministry seal."

Adelle signed the dotted line without a word. She was a little too preoccupied with biting the inside of her cheek to speak. She then pointed her mass-produced, Ministry-issued wand at the parchment but didn't wave. With an odd pleading look, she warned, "This is for reasonable expenses. They'll read that as absolutely necessary and five Knuts cheaper than the damaged discount."

The words, _and anything extravagant will get me sacked_ passed between them.

"I'll try to resist the lure of the gold-plated cauldrons, Miss Dubois," he remarked dryly.

To avoid snickering she swished her wand. With a gaudy show of crimson sparks—Severus winced purely out of habit—the seal of the British Ministry of Magic appeared alongside her sweeping signature in all its resplendent, lumpy potato-shaped glory.

Severus raised one brow. "Wordless casting? I didn't think the Ministry schools bothered to teach that."

She grimaced briefly before smoothing her face and shrugging. "They don't. But you're _supposed_ to know how to before they tell you any authorization incantations."

"Meaning Fudge hasn't the brains of a Chocolate Frog," he interpreted. He pulled out his pocket watch again. "Hex it. Diagon Alley is going to be murder—where's the nearest Floo?"

She pointed up. "Next floor, right by the elevator, and…thank you."

He nodded back at her, once, curtly, then looked down and put away the watch, the Ministry parchment, and the rare pleasant expression that had mistakenly found its way onto his face. He started to turn away then stopped, unsure what he was forgetting. He is eyes scanned the room, ran over Adelle's desk, and —ah—nearly skipped over a certain ward of the Ministry sitting in a chair a little too quietly.

—

…_weave through, and wallow, wane, whisper, waver…_

Somewhere along the line, Nibble had ceased to plunge in and out of the smoke and had simply become it. Her wispy gray wings left trails of haze. Behind her, loops and twirls danced in the soft blue sky. Her cares had been shed in the same way. The Forest's call, the constant whispers, all finally drifted away and let her be at peace. Even the ever-present voice of her mother (more of a chicken than an owl) stopped warning her about the gruesome death of her uncle Horus, who had flown through apparition trails one time too many. Not that the old mother hen would know how he had kicked it, as he had never been seen again…

With an aggravated keen, Nibble rolled in the air and shucked off those thoughts as well.

_O weave through, wind through, wing through the whorls! Wind through—wind through…_

Her mind wouldn't let her be, though. Something was beginning to feel off, and it was an odd batch of feelings: disbelief, heartbreak—unworthiness? What in Archimedes's butt feathers? She drifted over the Ministry building, unable to understand this sudden sense of abandonment.

Her wing motion stalled. She glanced down with a sharpened gaze. That little…

—

With the lunch hour over, the queue for the outgoing Floo was mercifully short. Severus soon found himself reaching into a pot of acid-green powder. He paused for a moment with his hand griping the gritty stuff and wondered why he was nagged by the feeling that he had forgotten something he would regret. Of course, the thought to apologize for his rudeness to Department Head Umbridge had conveniently slipped his mind, but he somehow doubted that would ever come back to haunt him.

He eventually shrugged it off and led Fen onto the hearth. Technically, children over the age of eight were supposed to Floo by themselves. There was also a complicated formula involving height and weight classes that was designed to make brain matter ooze out of the parent's ears. Thank Merlin he'd never had children. He looked down at the small child beside him. For some reason, he didn't think the Ministry would call him on it.

He called out "Diagon Alley." Then, as he was about to throw the powder, he heard an odd rush of air and a screech. He looked up to watch a livid, literally smoking owl appear from nowhere and swoop in on him, talons first. The Floo powder dropped from his hand as he raised his arm instinctively. The bird's wicked feet dug into his robe's sleeve right as there was an explosion of green.

By the time the spots had left the startle onlookers' eyes, the hearth was empty, and the dark wizard, the small child, and the homicidal owl were all long gone.

—

"_Well, that's something—"_

"—_I thought I'd never see."_

Arthur Weasley's head whipped away from his sandwich and towards the speakers fast enough to catch a Snitch. The twins? Here! Merlin, please, oh—Oh.

Rick Abrack and Michael Curio grinned at him. "Should have been there, Arthur," Rick told him. "The whole fifth floor's in chaos."

The twins wormed their way back into Arthur's mind. "What happened?"

Michael shrugged as though to say it wasn't important. "Something got through the apparition wards—and you'll never guess what."

Oh. Something that could break through Ministry wards designed to keep out the darkest of dark wizards wasn't important. _Right._ "I don't think I want to know," he replied edgily. Their mother was going to murder them. Was it possible for a Howler to swallow two fifth years whole?

"An owl!" laughed Rick suddenly, throwing him for a loop. "It just exploded into the main hall and dive-bombed some schmuck trying to Floo out. "They're still trying to clear out all the smoke!" He sobered briefly. "Hope the kid'll be okay."

_Not Ron, not Ron_, Arthur's brain was pleading. "Kid?" he asked with a deceptive calm.

"Yeah. The wizard in the Floo had his little boy with him. The powder fell when the thing snatched his arm, and all three of them got transported. Owl's big, too. Had a wingspan almost bigger than the kid."

Michael cut in with a snicker, "And in the meantime, the Ministry's running around with its head chopped off—" He glared when his friend suddenly cuffed him.

"Hey," Rick frowned, "show a little concern. There's a kid trapped in a fireplace somewhere with a crazed owl big enough to eat him."

He shrugged again. "I'm more concerned about the owl. Did you see the guy it latched on to? Dark looming fellow, greasy hair, hooked nose, killing curse eyes? Hell, he scared _me_ from twenty feet—and you think that some barn owl is going to stand a chance against that guy when his little kid's in danger?" He was too busy laughing to notice that Arthur was staring at him, dumbstruck, slack-jawed and bug-eyed.

_No,_ Arthur thought. _Snape has a—? Merlin, no. Never in a million years, no…_

—

The Owl Apparition incident would later be debunked as a fraud—with a tiny shattered window two floors up on the opposite end of the heavily warded building used as evidence of the enormous bird's perfectly normal entry—and the Ministry would calmly return to the status quo. Arthur Weasley, however, would never quite be the same ever again.

In the meantime...

* * *

Heh. 

Thanks again for reviewing **duj**.


	14. Shopping from Hell

_Sigh. Have you any idea how hard it is to write a chapter by a deadline you promised to meet when the plot changes four times!_

_Well, here is the said chapter from Hell. Enjoy, and thanks for all the reviews last time._

* * *

It was not often that a man was attacked by an overlarge bird of prey in one fireplace and forcibly slammed into the back of another over a mile away. But then, Severus Snape was having an incredibly bizarre weekend. He hit the sooty bricks with a wheeze and collapsed down the wall until his feet found purchase at last and he halted with most of his body only a foot from the ground. The owl's wings brushed against either side of the sheltered outdoor fireplace. Her talons cut through the robe, undershirt, and flesh of his upraised forearm. She flared up, hulking and screeching. He was being loomed over, he realized, and he did not like it one bloody bit.

"_Damned bird!"_ he snarled. He powered himself forward and out of the tri-wall enclosure using his free arm and what little leverage his legs had. She thrashed but did not let go of his arm until he swung around violently with the intent to bash her into the bricks of the public Floo station. She foresaw her imminent meeting with the wall, however, and instead used the momentum of his swing to propel her into the air and leave him staggering.

After regaining his balance, Severus sagged and leaned against the fireplace for support. '_How could this weekend get any worse?' _he groused to himself as the owl screeched above him.

He had no idea.

—

'_Of all the nerve!'_ Nibble was hooting as she hovered over the man and boy. _'He tried to Floo without me—tried to abandon me…"_ Her wings grew heavy at that thought until she shook it off and swooped to land on a lamppost. To drown out the whispers that stubbornly lodged in her mind, she cursed loudly.

Fenrir looked both terrified and impressed as he regarded the vehemently hooting owl above him. "Does your mother know you know that?" he asked after a time.

To the amusement of a few bystanders, the squawking bird shut up immediately.

—

Unfortunately for the reclusive professor's nerves, the weekend after Halloween was the shopping event of the year. The streets of Diagon Ally were paved with sale-hunting witches and towering heaps of packages with legs. The congestion was worse than the Hogwarts stairwells at dinnertime. The usual intimidation tactics failed to grant Severus any breathing room. It was all he could do to keep Fen from being trampled when the store they were passing by announced a price cut.

The feeling of stepping into the quiet, unhurried atmosphere of Madam Malkin's was similar to that of finding the one patch of cool shade in Hell. In his relief, Severus failed to notice that the boy at his side was suddenly tense enough snap in two if looked at. Instead the man watched Madam Malkin wander out of the back room looking completely unflustered and even a bit bored. The witch worked on commission, so she had no sale items for the shoppers to swarm. It was through the party season and the back-to-school rush that she made her living. She seemed pleasantly surprised to see Severus and his young charge.

"Yes?" she asked expectantly. "Can I help you?"

He stuck to the bare minimum of necessary information. With a gesture to the boy, he explained, "Fenrir was recently made a Ministry ward. It's been arranged for him to attend Hogwarts. He will be needing school robes,"—Fen twitched—"a set of everyday robes,"—he twitched again—"trousers,"—and again—"shirts, winter over-wear…everything." Not that anyone was noticing, but the small boy in the shop seemed to be in the throes of an epileptic fit.

Malkin's round face pinched with thought. "A Ministry ward?" she repeated in a questioning tone. "I don't do work for many of those." Severus doubted she had ever done any. He studied her frown. "If you don't mind my asking," she asked at last, "how much gold did the Ministry allow for the boy's…outfitting?"

"Oh. They were supposed to give me a spending limit?" The innocent air with which he asked question fit him about as well as a three-fingered glove. He pulled out the enchanted parchment and allowed her to see the glowing Ministry seal. "Whatever amount you think is prudent," he told her flatly. "Where do you want the boy?"

—

The elf formerly known as Dobbin had just discovered his personal Hell: being sewn into clothes. He managed to ignore the possessed pins and snaking needles for the most part, but the feeling of cloth being pulled ever tighter against his skin made him writhe. However, as he started to squirm, the Madam shot him her fifty-eighth admonishing look. He ducked his head to hide his pained grimace. He vaguely recalled a small Draco Monster tugging at tiny, constricting shirt cuffs and absolutely bawling. As a House Elf, he had understood the child's horror at being forced to wear clothes—and uncomfortable ones at that—but now he had complete empathy for the boy.

He wondered which human had invented clothes. Surely it had been a professional torturer.

Finally the pins and needles released him, and he hobbled off the platform, completely encased. Malkin nodded absently to herself as she double-checked a long page of measurements. "If you'll stop in again in a few hours, I should have the rest done," she told Severus. "Now, if you don't mind…"

He handed her the parchment, but watched over her shoulder as she scratched in the name of her shop, the purchased items, and their prices with her quill. The smooth, looped characters disappeared from the parchment one by one, and she nodded as her quill briefly glowed the same color as the Ministry seal.

"Well, everything seems to be in order. Have a pleasant afternoon. The boy can wear that outfit out."

Fen wondered what he had done to deserve this fate.

—

Nibble had made it a habit to wait on the rooftop of each shop that Severus and Fen entered, then lazily glide after them as they tried to force their way through the crowd's gridlock. After five shops, she had become so lulled by the routine that she neglected to notice where exactly she was following the pair until it was too late and—

"_Athena!"_

Underneath her feathers, she blanched. Oh no, not the Owl Emporium. She hazarded a look. Sure enough, there was the old shop that she had spent most of her childhood trying to escape from, and there—tethered to the outdoor roost, resembling nothing more than a golden, over-plump, overexcited chicken—was her mother.

"_Athena! Hatchling, you've come home!"_ The joyous note to the mother hen's hoots lasted for all of two seconds. Then: _"How dare you leave! Unbonded—and flapping about like a wild…wild hawk! You irresponsible, immature, thoughtless, unloving—!" _

'Oh, Archimedes, kill me now…' Nibble pleaded silently. 

—

In the latest shop, Fen stopped dead in the doorway as his belly flopped over and his knees threatened to collapse. He didn't know if it was the inherent magic of the place making him sick or just the sight before him. Wands. Wands on the table, wands jutting out of a pile of fallen boxes, and hundreds of the same, long, narrow boxes crammed into every available shelf, all filled, he feared, with wands.

He swallowed. The jig—as he had heard a human say once—was up. House Elves and wands did not mix. He circumspectly took a step backwards and out of the shop, but before he could lift his foot for a second step, Severus grabbed his wrist and dragged him in.

Such were his nerves, that when the owlish human appeared from nowhere, he all but jumped out of his skin. The wizard didn't seem to notice, but only smiled in a drowsy way and rolled up his sleeves. Severus nodded his head at the man and explained, "We're here to purchase a wand." He paused, and then firmly added, "The boy is of age."

The wizard tilted back his head. His spectacles gleamed unnaturally in the dim light. "I can see that."

Fen suddenly felt cold. This human was the first to notice that he was older than eight. He bit his lip. Humans and House Elves aged differently; House Elves were slower. He hadn't thought about it before, but that could be a real problem.

"Why isn't the lad in school?" the wizard asked suddenly.

After a time, Severus answered, "He was only found recently."

"Oh? I didn't think a child could fall through the cracks for so long."

The professor frowned at the shopkeeper's emphasis on the word 'long.' Yes, two months late was odd, but it was hardly a precedent. There were stories of teenaged muggleborns, untrained and sending out surges of accidental magic as easy as breathing. The Muggles called them hell spawn or possessed, and the ending of the story was rarely happy unless the Ministry stepped in. Fenrir Svartálfar, however, was hardly a teenager.

Fen had closed his eyes. There was a long silence, in which an odd prickling of the back of his neck grew almost unbearable.

"Mr. Ollivander," Severus said at last with a hard edge to his voice.

"Mnm?"

Fen whipped around to see the wizard bent over to study him through gleaming lenses. He repressed a swallow.

"_Ollivander._ We are here to buy a wand, _not to_—" but whatever Severus was going to snap was cut off when Ollivander frowned and grabbed both of Fen's wrists.

"Which hand, then?" he muttered. Fen curled both hands into fists. Severus eventually supplied that the boy wrote left-handed, but the standstill leading up to that divulgement was long and painful. After the words left the man's lips, the left hand in question was attacked by measuring tape. Ollivander nodded at the final verdict and pulled a box from the nearest shelf. "Here." The wand found inside was pressed into Fen's hand. "Give it a wave, then."

The boy paled. A thousand thoughts careened through his overworked brain. When he couldn't make a wand work, they would know he wasn't a wizard. But he had been accepted to a magic school, so he had to be magical. They would realize that a magical non-wizard was a non-human, starting them down a train of thought that was very detrimental to his health.

With a gulp, Fen flicked his wrist ever so slightly.

The wand exploded.


	15. The Untaughts

**This is not an "insanely powerful child-wizard gets amazing magical wand" chapter. I hate reading those, so I tried to do something different. **

**

* * *

**

—

Ollivander's head dropped down to one side after the blinding light of the explosion had faded. He seemed to collapse in on himself. His spine curled, his eyes lost their unnerving focus, and his mind retreated inward. The words left his lips in a low monotone. "Well. That doesn't happen every day." He came forward to where Fen was lying dazed on the floor and twisted the boy's arm to bare the wrist. The skin was pale, the veins darker and upraised. He traced a swollen artery. "Damn."

With a wrenching pull, Fen tugged his arm out of the shopkeeper's grasp. He cradled it against his chest and, still half on the floor, backed away towards the door. Somewhat to his surprise, Severus let him.

The darker wizard had his attention on Ollivander. "What?" he demanded.

Ollivander picked up a charred splinter of rosewood from the floor. "The heartstring couldn't take the strain," he muttered to himself. He threw the piece of wood across the room before turning back to the pair. He smiled for Fen. "Well, follow me."

_"What happened?"_

He glanced at Severus. His usual cheerful manner, undaunted by nothing, had slipped to reveal a bleak stare. The shake of his head was slight, just as slight the gesture towards Fen. "It's perfectly natural," he told the professor, though his levity of tone was for the boy. A broom was now sweeping through the shop to clear away the debris from the wand. He folded his arms and looked down at the gathering pile. "Quite common in the fifties, actually, though I always hoped that I'd seen the last of it. It's a little hard on my wares, you see." The last was said with only marginal humor. "The Ministry's stores were absolutely destroyed the last time around. The junk it issues as wands invariably did _that_"—he pointed at the pan of rosewood slivers being floated away—"when the children touched them. Mine never fared much better, though at least they could get a wave or two out of them first. I was able to find something that worked, however, so if you'll follow me?"

—

The back room of the shop was much different than the front display. A skylight banished the murky atmosphere that most of Diagon Ally proudly touted. Except for a few wood shavings on a workbench and couple of snapped, scraggly feathers on the floor, the place was spotless. The walls were lined with displays of glass. Fen went up to one and, on tiptoes, peered inside. Cushioned on silk lay a wand. Instead of wood, it appeared to be carved out of a translucent jade. He stared at its intricate designs until he noticed the head over his shoulder in the glass cover's reflection. Ollivander smiled at him when he whipped around to stare.

"From the Orient," said the wizard of the wand. "Over a thousand years old. That silver you might see inside is the hair of a _kiilin, _the forefather of the unicorn. Beautiful, powerful, and perfect for heavy defensive work, but as you can see, also perfectly impractical." He ruffled Fen's raven hair and didn't notice the boy's sudden flinch. "Why don't you look around, Fenrir? See if you take a particular shine to a wand in my collection."

The man waved Fen on to the next case before unbending slowly, taking his time to return to his full, perilous height. He turned to Severus and said gravely, "Follow me."

—

The third room was very old. It seemed to have been built for the reception of important customers. Several plush chairs sat against one wall. On the opposite was a professional-looking desk. The far end of the room was empty, save for the crackling of wards. Severus recognized the designs. They were the same as the ones carved into the walls of the Potion classroom. Out of curiosity, he had once had a detention student scrub the same patch of wall until the underlying stone was visible. It had taken fourteen hours, but it had been worth it to see the impressive warding structure—for Severus, anyway. The Ravenclaw had never gone near the classroom walls again.

Ollivander gestured for him to sit in one of the velvet chairs. The wandmaker walked to the desk. He waved a hand at a decanter full of violet liquor. "Something to drink?" he asked Severus. After receiving a no for an answer, he poured a glass to the brim and knocked it back. "Witches and wizards used to be fitted for wands in here," he remarked as he poured himself another. Then he added, "Back when the profession was in its glory. Things were different then." He sighed, then shrugged and gestured towards Severus. "About the exploding wands… I was able to discover a solution to the problem because of my study of wands and their making in the past. Wands were made sturdier in earlier centuries. Do you know why?"

Severus folded his arms and shrugged, not seeing a connection between what Ollivander had said and the situation at hand. "Intermixing with the Muggle population weakened magic in the blood over time," he stated flatly. It was a textbook answer. Half-bloods' magic tended to be invigorated by the fresh blood, yes, but over generations the non-magic ancestry always made itself known. The lines weakened, and the only cause for blame was the thinned blood.

"Not _quite_."

He looked up sharply.

Ollivander glanced at the forefinger he had raised and closed the hand into a fist. He stepped forward and began to pace with the glass still in hand. "In the sixteenth century, apprenticeship was the main form of teaching. Are you familiar with it?"

"I'm a Potions Master," Severus snapped, agitated. "What does _apprenticeship_ have to do with weaker magic?"

The wandmaker smiled and ignored the question. "Oh, good. This will be much easier to explain, then. An apprenticeship typically began at what age?"

"Eleven."

"Exactly. And one became a journeyman at…?"

"Fifteen or so," Severus supplied. His eyes narrowed. "Though—"

"It used to be later? Seventeen?"

"Correct."

Ollivander nodded. "Now what if I told you a wizard wouldn't receive his wand until he was a journeyman?"

"What!"

"Exactly." Ollivander shrugged. "Wizards only started to purposefully use magic after they had mastered the skills of their trade. Accidental magic and the subsequent buildup of power in the blood used to be considered a natural part of the growing process. Of course, that all changed when the Ministry took control of Wizarding society, particularly when it came to the schooling of children. They did away with the apprenticeship system as much as they could, claiming that it was a breeding ground for dark wizards."

The Potions Master did not comment.

The Wandmaker gulped down his glass. "The problem was, there were suddenly hundreds of untrained magical children congregated in small spaces. Hogwarts was somewhat prepared, as all their respective apprentices had traditionally eaten and slept together, but the ministry schools couldn't cope with the concentration of accidental magic." He grinned. "If I remember correctly, some of the less liked teachers actually exploded."

Professor Snape did not laugh.

Ollivander moved on. "So they started a magical youth program, where children were given training wands—essentially toys—until they came of age and were able to use something more powerful. It's still a tradition to buy a better wand after graduating from the Ministry schools, though that's mainly because the wands they're given as children are junk." He took a seat at the desk and seemed to be debating pouring himself a third. "Not that the Ministry would know this or care, but shortly thereafter, wandmakers had to drastically change the way they made wands. The graduates of the Ministry schools just couldn't make the old, stronger kind work. The Ministry had inadvertently changed the way we use magic. It used to be about using the skills any Muggle could develop, and then infusing the end product with a powerful surge of magic. Potion-making still uses that theory to an extent, I believe."

Severus nodded.

"In the 1500s, the art of enchanting died. Magic became less about power, and more about refinement, precision, and ingenuity. Most of the spells we use today were developed in the first few decades after the Ministry took control of education. Neither branch of magic is inferior to the other, mind, just different. And that's the problem."

The wandmaker closed his eyes. "The Ministry was in complete ruin during the war in the forties. Grindelwald had only been the icing on the cake, really. With the Goblins holed up underground because of the Muggle air bombings, money was tight, and the Ministry cut corners. They completely abandoned the Muggleborns. Hogwarts took in as many children as it could—for a time Muggleborns outnumbered everyone else combined, I think—but there were still well over a thousand untaught magical children in Muggle England. Not all Muggleborn, either. In the war, many half- and pure-blooded children were misplaced."

Ollivander sighed. "In some cases, the magic in their blood was repressed and they grew up in a normal Muggle fashion—but in others, the magic wouldn't stay quiet. It was the stress of growing up in war, we think. Five years after the Ministry started the policy, there were untrained teenage witches and wizards causing more trouble accidentally than five Aurors could manage on purpose. In '52, The Ministry decided they were a threat to secrecy, and they were brought in to learn control. Unfortunately, the Untaughts, as they were called, had magic that acted exactly like that of Journeymen of the 1500s. Modern wands aren't built to handle that sort of power."

Severus drew a conclusion. "So you built them wands in the old fashion?"

Ollivander sighed and started pouring. "Unfortunately, Ministry-sanctioned exterminations in the sixteenth seventeenth centuries killed off the species that provided the old power sources. They were deemed too dangerous to live. Though I did have some success with Phoenix feathers with the borderlines, most of the Untaughts burned them out. The children were too far gone. The only solution was to try to match them up with old wands that had survived the years. A program was developed where collection wands and museum pieces could be loaned to students for learning purposes." He stood again. "The theory was that after they learned control, they would be able to handle a normal wand. To my sorrow, this was not the case. After their schooling, the old wands were returned to their rightful owners, and they discovered that no other wand would work for them. They had control, yes, but now they understood the power they could never have. The suicide rates were high in those years." He looked meaningfully at Severus. "The rest turned their backs on Muggle society, though I still see younger versions of their faces…from time to time."

"Stirring story," Severus remarked. "What I don't understand is what this has to do with Svartálfar…Fenrir. I doubt he's eleven, let alone an age where magic would be built up in his blood like your Untrained Muggleborns."

"They weren't all Muggleborn," the wandmaker corrected.

"That doesn't answer me, Mr. Ollivander."

The man shrugged. "One of the effects of large amounts of accidental magic is stunted growth. As you might recall, wizards used to be shorter. All of the Untaughts I dealt with were unusually small, though malnourishment was also a factor there."

Severus closed his eyes.

"Judging by my experience, Mr. Snape, that boy must be at least thirteen. Thirteen was the fringe age," Ollivander sighed. "Half could handle fortified Phoenix feather wands. The others"—he gestured towards the door they had entered—"were lost causes. I'm afraid Fenrir is one of the latter."

Severus pinched the bridge of his nose, not liking one bit where this was going. "Would it be best, then,"—he paused, not quite believing he was about to suggest this—"best to raise the boy as a squib and save him the heartache?"

Ollivander shook his head. "The Untaughts ranged in age from twelve to twenty-two. ...The numbers started staggering at nineteen. Of the thirty or so twenty-two year olds, twenty-four died before we could find them proper wands. Without proper training, the magic built up too much in their blood…and it killed them." He sagged in his chair. "And of the younger ones, several hundred never found a wand they could use. …Like I said, the suicide rates were high in those years." He grasped the glass and downed his third.

Severus stared at him a moment as the complications of that statement sunk in. Then he ran a hand over his face.

The weekend had just gotten worse.

—

It took a few minutes for Fen to notice that he was alone in the room and that there was nothing keeping him from walking out the back door. Severus was gone, and Nibble was busy guarding the front. He could leave this madness, disappear to the fringe of the Muggle world, grow out of his damned childhood, and forget that any of this nightmare had ever happened. He was good at forgetting nightmares.

He straightened his shoulders and started for the door. One hand trailed along the vertical sides of the row of glass cases. He was about ten feet from freedom, when he suddenly stopped. He turned and frowned at the palm that rested on a smooth plane of glass. He tugged. Nothing. He put his other hand on the glass for leverage.

It was fifteen minutes later that Severus and Mr. Ollivander returned to the room to find Fen standing in the same spot, his hands firmly and inexplicably attached to the glass.


	16. Lucky

I'm back. Finally. This is my Spring Break now, the one small breather I get before four final exams (the week I come back), College Placement tests (that Friday), and five Advanced Placement exams (the week after that). So basically twenty hours of tests and God knows how many of cramming.

…I'm doomed, aren't I?

* * *

_Elfin  
_Bone White Butterfly

"Lucky"

* * *

As orphan servant children went, Fen did hold a certain resemblance to Cinderella. However, his magical transformation was unfortunately permanent, and Severus would hurl the first person to compare him to a bizarrely dressed, wand-toting grandmother into a Potions cauldron.

Furthermore, the chances of Narcissa becoming his stepmother were close to 'nil, and he'd likely kill himself if he had Draco for a stepbrother, let alone two of himm. Yet another telling sign was that Fen did not want to go to the castle. The clincher, though, was that glass was obsessed with his hands, not feet, and instead of falling off too easily, it would _not _let go. So he was forced to stand before the display case with his palms glued to the tauntingly gleaming surface. Part of him supposed he was lucky he hadn't touched his tongue to the glass. That didn't make him any less frustrated.

He was contemplating the pros and cons of head butting the damn thing when the Wandmaker led Severus back into the room. Upon seeing him, the professor sent him a 'stop misbehaving immediately' look. Fen interpreted this as an order to get his grubby hands off the glass. He wished he could throw up his hands in a helpless gesture. He glanced back at the captive limbs. On second inspection, they weren't stuck on the thick layer of glass; they were stuck _inside_ it. The backs of his hands remained free, but the palms and fingers were trapped in the transparent prison.

Severus had been stalking towards him. Up close now, the man stopped and stared at the sight. In an act of denial, he pinched his nose and very deliberately looked up at a patch of ceiling where the small boy was nowhere in sight.

Behind them, Ollivander tilted his head to the side like only those of avian blood had any right to. "Found a wand that interests you, then, Fenrir?"

Fen blinked. He finally focused his eyes beyond his hostage fingertips and saw a long, dark wand aiming its tip at his heart. He cringed, and, to his surprise, curled his hands into weak fists as they came free of the glass. He took a large step backwards away from the case. The wand twitched.

He held up his hands submissively. The wand…lowered itself. He closed his eyes. Wonderful.

—

"Alright, take it now."

Fen glanced critically at the wand Mr. Ollivander held out to him. He wasn't keen on another explosion. The human's promises that it wouldn't happen again had not reassured him. The fact that he was standing inside a foot-thick circle of wards might have had something to do with it. That Ollivander was wearing a glowing plate mail gauntlet in order to hand him the wand just cinched it.

Of course he was glad the man hadn't yelled 'Elf!' when the first wand had been destroyed. He was just worried that they would keep trying wands with him until either they figured out he wasn't human, or he had become a pile of ashes. Though, to tell the truth, he would prefer to be cinders. For some time now, he'd been having visions of losing his fingers one joint at a time.

This wand was bigger than the first one. Maybe it would do the trick of putting him out his misery. He took the long rod from Ollivander's steel fingers. He studied the wand for a moment. It was the length of his forearm. Though it was smooth, there seemed to be faint carvings in the dark wood. He frowned. Was it wood? It almost felt…

"Give it a wave, then."

Fen looked up at the Wandmaker, who had moved to stand on the opposite side of the room. Behind Severus. Hell, if this whole thing hadn't already been unsettling. He took a steadying breath, prayed for a quick death, and swished the wand down forcefully. And something within him shifted.

The thundering spray of a waterfall, the surge of an avalanche, lightning smashing into the earth—explain it how you will, but a primal whiteness struck the barrier of his flesh, then rebounded and jetted through the seams of his soul, flooded into the wand, and, lawless, roiled into the air, blinding and enthralling, a force that he knew in his bones but could not name.

And, oddly enough, for just a moment he thought he heard his mother calling his name.

Then he fainted dead away.

—

Severus removed his arms from before his eyes when he was fairly certain he hadn't died. It took bit longer for his eyes to convince themselves that they weren't blind. He blinked into the now dim room, slow to take in the pale walls, the wood of the floor, the madly swirling ward runes, and the fallen boy at their heart. Ollivander held him back when he stood and made to go to Fenrir's side.

"Wait for the wards to settle," he was told.

He sagged back into the chair without meaning to. "What happened?"

"What happens every time a wand chooses a wizard."

Severus frowned. He could remember there being a pervading glow when he had first become acquainted with his wand, but it had been nothing like that. He also distinctly recalled _not_ fainting. He told the Wandmaker so with his voice heavily laced with the demand for an answer.

Ollivander shrugged. "He's Untaught."

The Untaught explanation again. His teeth clenched. Would that be the excuse for all of the boy's peculiarities for the rest of time? He stood and stalked through the now unmoving wards. Fenrir lay with the wand still in hand. His veins had gone dark again but weren't trying to burst from his skin, except in the hand that curled around the wand. Severus crouched and studied the ebon stick of… He frowned and almost ran his fingers along the wand's length before he thought better of it. He settled for peering closer. "This isn't made of wood," he said at last and looked to Ollivander. If the man told him it wasn't wood because the boy was an Untaught…

"No. It's bone," was the reply.

"_Black_ bone?" He was incredulous. "What creature did it come from?"

"An Elf."

It was a good thing that Fen had already fainted.

—

Severus seemed about ready to follow the boy into unconsciousness, or to at least settle for an aneurysm. _"WHAT!"_

Fen stirred at the noise. _"…Hell?"_ he asked in a mumble.

The Potions Master didn't notice the Elf. He stared at the unruffled Wandmaker in disbelief. "That wand is made of _Elfin_ bone!"

Ollivander only nodded with a shrug.

"_What?"_ the boy squeaked, instantly awake and scrambling away from the wand. Severus watched him back into the far wall. At least _he_ was reacting to the bone of an Elf the way he was supposed to. With a look back to Ollivander, he snarled, "You let a _child_ near that thing?"

"He needs a wand."

"_That_ wand?"

The Wandmaker's eyes went hard, his voice low. _"Have you any idea how lucky he is that a wand even chose him?"_

Severus opened his mouth, then closed it, clenching his fist. He glared at the Wandmaker, and with grim, undying patience, the Wandmaker met his gaze.

—

Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, a small Elfin child clutched at his drawn-up knees. He knew how lucky he was that a wand had chosen him. He stared at the blackened bone and shivered. He knew exactly how lucky.

* * *

_Yeesh, and it was so humorous in the beginning, too. Unfortunately, I had to do something to counterbalance the "OC gets amazing wand" cliché, because that's a common symptom of the Mary Sue, dammit. Therefore, Fen's wand must be a constant reminder that wizards would and will kill him. …poor tyke. _

_On a lighter note: …Man, if this isn't the longest wand scene _ever._ It's been 2.5 chapters now, and they haven't even paid, which might get pretty interesting... _

Oh, and I happen to really love the Review Reply feature, so feel free to ask questions. I actually answer them.


	17. The Deal

--_pokes up head nervously-- _um, whoops? I blame the 5 AP tests.

* * *

They left the Ollivander's at the break of dusk. Neither the long shadows, nor the feeling of unease that drifted from the ajar shop door could claim responsibility for the drawn look of Severus's face. He walked down the alley with his hand upon a small shoulder, unsure whether he guided or was being led. Fairy tales trapped his mind, and, inevitably, the faint memories of his mother came to haunt. There wasn't much that hadn't been corrupted by his life, but her hair, woven into the dark, and her soft tellings of the Founders' war against the Elves remained in a confused haze, like the trapped smoke left behind after the candlelight had been snuffed out. 

She had never spoken of the horrors. Those, of course, belonged to life and not to stories.

A loud, clucking squawk came within range of hearing, and, surfacing from his thoughts, he raised his gaze to see a very large barn owl attempting to shrink back into the size of an egg. The source of the screeching was a small bird that, for some reason, made him think of a Weasley Howler.

——

Fen pressed his hands against the sides of his head when a particularly impressive blast assaulted his ears. He peered through his wince and saw Nibble looking miserable. It probably had something to do with the hysteric owl a few feet down the perch from her.

**"OSPREY AND REDTAIL DROPPED PACKAGES TO GO LOOKING FOR YOU! I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU! ATHENA** **ARCHIMEDES—"**

Nibble looked away and spotted him. _"Fen?"_

"—**I DON'T CARE ABOUT SWAMPLAND, YOU IRRESPONSIBLE—"**

"_FEN!" _Nibble's exuberant call was the boy's only warning before she launched herself at him. He raised his arm, something he was doing a lot lately, and she alighted on it with her customary downbeat of wings that nearly blew him off his feet.

"_FEN! YOU'RE BACK!" _she whooped. _"WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG!"_

His face erupted in confusion and terror when she reached forward and began to nibble affectionately on his ear lobe. Then she hooted under her breath, _"Just pretend that I'm your owl for ten wing beats and your ears won't become owl pellets. Deal? Perfect." _She raised her voice. **_"Oh, Mother! This is Fen, my boy. I would have told you about him sooner, but, well, I couldn't get a word in. He's going to Hogwarts. We really must get going. Dreadfully late. It was nice catching up, though! —_**_Get me out of here!"_ she added to Fen in a hiss, and Fen dutifully, if hesitantly, tugged on Professor Snape's sleeve.

Severus had been staring at the gobsmacked owl tied to the perch before the Owl Emporium. It had keeled over backwards and was currently dangling by its tethered foot with its beak ajar. At the tug of his robe, he glanced down at Fenrir. Lording over the boy's upper arm and shoulder was the large, insane barn owl. His gaze drifted back to the upside-down owl that was swaying like a pendulum. Suddenly, Fenrir's bird didn't seem quite so cracked. Quite.

He sighed and pulled out the short letter from his pocket. He had been planning to ship it via normal owl post, but his sanity might rely on his keeping a minimum amount of contact with the homicidal bird that had obviously grown attached to the boy.

"Fenrir," he said, "I need to borrow your carrier pigeon."

——

Nibble was wishing for teeth merely so she could grind them together. Carrier pigeon! That aggravating man. His relation to Boom Stick Man was unmistakable. That family's only reason for existence was to get under her feathers. She seethed as she swooped across London. She should have bitten his head off!

Why hadn't she? Oh, yes. Her mother. Had it been worth it, though, to play the kept owl and avoid being screeched at for the rest of her life? The professor's letter clunked annoyingly against her leg, right on cue. She grumbled to herself as she headed for the rising column of smoke that the Muggle population thought came from a factory. Well, this day couldn't get any worse, now could it?

To her relief, it didn't, or at least not immediately, it didn't. She ducked in through an open window just as another bird swooped out. Then she cursed as she faced off against her old nemesis. It annoyed her almost as much as the Snape men did, and she was even more helpless against it than she was against her mother. She landed on a sturdy chair back and glared at the monstrosity.

Stupid doorknob.

"Er…"

She swiveled her head around. Behind her, a bug-eyed man sat glued to his seat. His clothes were nearly as shabby as Henry's, though time seemed to have made them that way instead of exuberance. The robes had been a nice, light shade of something or other at some point in their life, but they had long since faded to an odd gray-brown. Currently, the only thing colorful about the human was his red hair.

The vibrant shade didn't interest her nearly so much, though, as did his opposable thumbs.

——

Arthur Weasley sighed. Ministry of Magic Department Head turned Post Owl's Official Knob Turner. Yes, his career prospects were definitely looking up. At least the insane, somewhat terrifying owl was helping him not think about Severus Snape's…

Arthur Weasley shuddered.

——

When the doors to the governing chamber opened Adelle wanted to melt back into the shadows, fuse with them, and never leave. Instead she forced herself to stand still in the hall and wait for the slim, dark-haired Adonis Nott to step out of the recessed area. Clutching at Mr. Snape's note seemed to calm her nerves somewhat. She eventually spotted him heading towards the exit at a brisk walk and moved to intercept him before her nervousness could paralyze her.

"Lord Nott?" she asked nervously. He didn't slow any, but at least he glanced her way cursorily. "I was hoping that I might speak with you." She got the feeling he was ready to brush her off like an infinitesimal speck of soot. Snape's advice seared through her brain at the last possible moment. Right as his expression darkened and he opened his mouth, she quickly added, "My name is Adelle Dubois."

He stopped. Would it be improper for her to jump and scream for joy? He stopped!

"Any relation to Rowan Lairc Dubois?" His tone was light, and she caught him eyeing her robes' thread count.

She frowned. "My father was Rowan _Lammas_ Dubois."

His lips turned upwards in an affable smile. "Ah, yes. My mistake. You wished to speak to me?"

Her brain eventually remembered to let her blink. She shook herself slightly. Bad time to get caught up by the intent gaze of dark eyes set darker lashes. Also a bad time for her throat to decide to constrict. In self-preservation, she held out the professor's letter.

He took it. The mangled edges of the Hogwarts envelope caught his eye before he noticed Severus Snape's angular handwriting. Adelle tried not to bite her upper lip as he gave the missive a quarter turn and swept his gaze down the narrow column of words. She watched his expression darken with every inch and prayed that none of his ire would be taken out on her.

An owl's hooting at her back broke her from her thoughts. She turned to watch a large, striking bird launch from an uplifted arm and wing her way. A folded parchment spiraled down into her hands.

_Miss Adelle Dubois  
Department of Child Services  
The Ministry of Magic_

She frowned at the precise, angular script, which she recognized as Mr. Snape's, and hesitated before she unfolded the letter and skimmed through the short message inside. Then she glared at the owl that now perched atop the head of a statue, much to the stone wizard's displeasure. The letter crushed in her hand.

Elfin bone. The boy's wand was made of elfin bone, and it was the Ministry's responsibility to pay.

Well. This would make her job go up in flames nicely.


	18. Darkness

_I finally came back to this. After some soul searching, I decided I needed to start writing for me again. And this crazy OC thing instantly sprang to mind. I've got a few chapters stored away, so huzzah, this story won't disappear into the deep dark depths of the site archive anytime soon._

* * *

XXX

Darkness

XXX

The sun had set at Hogsmeade. Snow was falling. Winter had come. It was far from a joyous time. The village center was dark save for the miniscule glow from the banked coals of the public floo and Severus's pale Lumos. The air was biting and chill. The boy was shivering. He was too late; it had been a mistake to come.

Severus looked from the curfew sign nailed to a doused lamppost to the shuttered windows of the Hog's Head. There, pasted on a wooden slat was a poster of Black, mad and raving. The real thing could be lying in wait around the corner, for all Severus knew. He let his gaze slide beyond the tavern. Nestled between two darkened shops was the crooked cobblestone back-way that was the most direct route to Hogwarts.

The alley led to an archway in the crumbling wall of the village's old fortifications. Through that, an old pig herder's path cut a shallow, repetitive zigzag down the steep boulder-strewn hill and into the Forbidden Forest. The winding ancient path was eventually run over by the carriage road, an invention of the late eighteenth century. The road spanned the distance between the also reasonably new-fangled train station and the old-as-dirt school gates. Pass through the gates, and a traveler found himself confronted with the long stretch of Hogwarts' grounds between the wall and the safety of the castle.

The former servant of the dark lord had looked Death in the eye and kissed his robes. He refused to set one foot down that dark path. Unfortunately, it seemed to be his lot in life to have the sort of options where he really had none at all.

He glared at the wanted poster. Black: the single word summed up his predicament quite nicely.

The castle had sent him on his mad quest while there was a deranged Azkhaban convict with a history of trying to kill him (and nearly succeeding) on the loose. And since Black was trying to pluck precious Harry Potter from Hogwarts, the Floo system was warded against anything more invasive than a fire call. That necessitated approaching the castle on foot, which, given Hogsmeade was boarded up from paranoia, was inconvenient enough without the added host of Dementors let loose to circle the school's boundaries hungrily.

Loathsome and lawless as the creatures were in the daylight, after nightfall who was to say they might not "mistake" a Hogwarts Professor and his young charge for Sirius Black? One wizard looked much like another, especially in the dark, and with the child clutching at the man so tightly from fear it was easy to see why they would think the pair one trembling figure. Why, they even had managed to suck out only one soul with their kissing, as Snivellus clearly never had one to steal. And the boy, he was just a Ministry ward, and a very inconveniently expensive one at that, so no harm done. In fact, give the Dementor an Order of Merlin.

Well, carry on with the Potter Protection Plan, then.

Oh, there were some aspects of the day that even he couldn't lay at Black's feet. The rest had to do with karma—his extraordinarily awful karma. Beyond the usual torments in his life (Dumbledore's infuriating obtuseness, Lucius, having two Weasleys minimum per school term, and Potter's very existence), a castle now wanted to kill him.

That couldn't be the end of it, either. The logic of it all escaped him, but because of the castle, his somewhat-estranged, were-muggle, half-brother had threatened to eat him (and meant it). Because Henri had miraculously developed a backbone and an appetite for human flesh, it had become necessary to…flirt with a woman his dead mother's age with the face of a toad and a penchant for pink and kitten plates. He was also fairly certain that Hogwart's newest student of indeterminate age needed a wand worth Magical England's national debt to survive to Graduation. As a result, a charming young woman with luck almost as bad as his own was about to come under extreme fire for doubling Magical England's national debt.

Inwardly, he cursed. To top it all off, he had misjudged the time difference between Diagon and Hogsmeade. Damn Ollivander straight to Hell.

He had wasted too much time at the wand shop, arguing over price for the Ministry girl's sake. The old wizard actually had the gall to ask for quadruple of what they finally settled on: a number that threatened to make his brain dilate into aneurysm at the mere thought.

It had been a mistake to go to Flourish and Blotts' before taking the floo to Hogsmeade. Making it worse, he had argued too long over the haggling there, too, certain the sun would still be in the sky in Scotland when he arrived.

Severus looked again around the desolate High Street, at a loss and wishing there was something he could strangle. He should have known by now to never trust his luck, but he had and here he was.

At the rate he was going, he thought to himself, Black was going to appear out of a shadow any moment.

The sound of glass cracking on stone behind him was the last thing he or his heart needed to hear. Wand in an offensive grip, he whirled around to the left, dragging Svartálfar behind him.

After a beat, his shoulders slumped and he tried hard not to sigh. Or laugh. A dog. It was just a mangy, slack-jawed mutt with one foot put haphazardly into what had been a neat stack of empty milk bottles. "Black, indeed," he muttered. The dog took that as its cue to leap out of the mess of broken glass and lope out of sight down a narrow alley. The broken base of a bottle rolled slowly after it, clinking, passing eventually of range of the light still emanating from Severus's wand.

The boy only dared to breathe five seconds after High Street resumed its dead silence. "Sir," he began, then seemed to think it wiser to remain silent. He turned his head slightly away and averted his gaze. He couldn't have known it, but doing so offered the Potions Master a choice view of the whites of his eyes.

Severus's mind chose that moment to recall that should the boy die before reaching Hogwarts, the castle would become, as Albus had so whimsically put it, 'tetchy.' Tetchy, he supposed, as opposed to being merely annoyed, when 'the girl' (honestly, only Albus) had taken to flinging about and battering her professors upon her innards.

Finally releasing his sigh, he reached into a waistcoat pocket and withdrew a sickle, which he threw at the public floo's hearth. Green fire flared up. He maneuvered the boy back into the flame and called out "Diagon Commons."

The pair disappeared with a customary plume of smoke.

* * *

_Black, indeed. And Umbridge flirtations... I am trying to push more of the canon cast into this, though I do hope I haven't scarred anyone. I stumbled across an AU the other day where there was a mother named Delores Pettigrew…let that sink in a moment…yes, my thoughts exactly. _

_Happy (Unscarred) Readings,  
Butterfly_

_P.S.: _Story Alert if you want to know if Severus will EVER make it back to Hogwarts.


	19. Black Thoughts

After the pair had left Hogsmeade, Padfoot slunk back to the broken collection of milk bottles. He divided his time between carefully licking drops of fat cream off the larger glass shards and making bewildered looks at the floo.

Through the student mutterings that came of a weekend, he had learned of Snape's position as Potions professor and Slytherin head. This information conjured a picture of Snivellus á la Slughorn, albeit a slimier, tatty version. He had taken great joy in picturing greasy, gangly boy from memory transfigured into an obese bottom-feeder; it had been the second time he genuinely laughed in some twelve years. But this Snivellus was…different.

Where were the shabby outer robes with nothing underneath? This Snivellus had layers and layers buttoned snugly shut. This Snivellus still didn't have an ounce of fat on his bones, but he didn't shiver the slightest bit in the freezing chill. Padfoot looked balefully at a tiny pool of the thick creamy milk where it sat in an iced-over depression of the street. Hunger and the fear that putting too much cold in his insides would kill him battled until he plunged his head down in desperation. He lapped it up and held it in his mouth and looked back at the floo, waiting. This Snivellus stood tall. This Snivellus made his cold, aching guts churn with hate, but also…

Envy.

Oh, that chafed! To want, even for a brief second, Snivellus' lot. It wasn't fair. This Snivellus walked free, and he had his wand, and had warm clothes and enough food.

Food.

Wormtail, he decided then and there, he would eat. Just gobble up. Disgusting, more than likely, yes, but the blood would be hot. He swallowed the milk, debating where he could shelter that was almost. Almost warm, but never really. There was no almost about the hunger; it was always there, worse and worse and worse, and the child had looked so tasty.

Dismayed, he shook himself. Drops of ice melt flew off his sodden fur. He was not that hungry. And any child Snivellus would want to protect couldn't be that good anyway. Probably snake meat. He looked towards the woods. A snake. Oh, if _only._

One of the unbroken bottles had almost half of milk left inside. He wondered at the wastefulness, dipped his head to the side, and closed his jaws around the bottle's neck. Where to now? He needed to change back, needed to try to get dry, try to get warm enough to be able to risk sleeping. Part of him wanted to damn his mission—his _reason_—and just sleep. Let the cold stop his heart, a voice whispered. Let it end. _Come._

That thought last wasn't his voice. Fear flooded his sluggish veins. He darted for the shadows, plastering himself to the alley wall.

_Come to me._

It came down circling with the falling snow. He knew it by many names. It was the coiling darkness, the biting cold. It was silent screaming. It was demon, tormenter, predator—Dementor. _Where are you? _it asked. Most people couldn't decipher the creatures' whisperings in their souls, but he had been fluent for years. The words sent phantom caresses of his face. It was playing.

The Dementor undulated in the air above High Street, silk and smoke. A breeze carried it to the store window of Zonko's. It twisted, its covered head revolving at an angle unnatural, to peer through a gap between the drawn shade and the window's frame. _Are you here? No?_ It flowed backwards, closer.

There were several ghostly hands now, warm hands running up and down Padfoot's flanks. Warm, actually warm. He slumped against the wall as his eyes rolled up in bliss.

_Come. To me. I felt you. You were here._

He cracked open an eyelid, wondering whether to move. It felt so good.

The Dementor had reached the village center and was hovering over the dark mantle of the public floo. _I know you are here, _it crooned. _Don't be afraid. _Long, slender fingers, white as the milk in the bottle, reached out its insubstantial cloak to clutch at the brick and mortar. Slowly, it pulled itself down. Its garments billowed up into the sky, twisting with the wind as its limbs crawled towards the cobblestone road and then across it, head inches off the ground. _Come to me. Flesh and blood and soul, you were—here._

It froze in the spot where Snivellus and his little snake had stood a short time ago. It arched up and turned its head, almost a full revolution. _Come_, _now! _

A vein of ice shot through the warmth that cocooned Padfood, and he shivered. The bottle in his teeth clinked softly against the brick.

In an instant, the Dementor twined in around itself, and against the wind, it tore into the alley. The illusion of warmth was shredded. The cold and wet rushed back into him, forcing out a yelp. The bottle fell from his jaws, and then the Dementor was on him, slamming him against the wall. Fingers blindly groped at his body as his heart shuddered and he could only whine in terror. Then, with a snarl, it snarled and released him, then reached up and began to ascend, clawing its way up the wall. Bits of brick and mortar dust crumbled down onto his belly. He didn't dare move. He didn't dare breathe.

Reaching the rooftop, it let loose a howling shriek that must have chilled every soul for a hundred miles. A wind from the north howled back. The Dementor released its hold and arced into the sky. Ten minutes later, Padfoot turned and struggled up on all fours. Something had cracked when he met the wall. The bottle.

It was in pieces. A little milk was collected in a curved shard, but the rest appeared to have slid down into a crack between the alley street and the building's wall. His tongue darted forward. Some of the milk ended up in the curl of his tongue, but so did blood. He had sliced himself on the glass. He licked the shard clean anyway, savoring the cuts as they came. Blood, even the blood of a half-frozen, half-dead stray was warm.

Then there was no more milk with the blood, and then no more blood, only the fear and hurt left by the Dementor. He shuffled down the alley, groaning, and cursed Snivellus with every pitiful little thing he had. The man had lured the Dementor out to the village, to him, and then left for someplace warm and safe with not a care in the world.

XXX

The time was later back in Diagon than in Hogsmeade, easily over two hours after dark, but it was much warmer and a legion of lampposts were burning merrily. Severus was not feeling anything near merry. In fact, he was trying—and failing—not to envy Black. The man was, no doubt, holed away someplace safe and remote, laughing at the world but at him in particular. He after all, was the one charged with the task of finding lodging for the night for himself and a passably pretty, rumpled and frightened boy child that was only kept from vanishing by means of a solid grip on a small elbow.

A rosy picture the two of them did not make by any stretch as they entered the Commons. The boy's state was previously mentioned. As for himself, he had emerged from the floo all but screaming dark and threatening wizard at 2 o'clock. As he unwillingly exuded this persona, he stood awkwardly, casting glance at first the east end of Diagon and then the mouth of Knockturn, debating the merits of arrest by zealot Auror and slow death by unhygienic mob.

At that moment he was leaning towards the mob. Reason: the two Aurors emerging west Diagon. They were of the Bully Boy design he'd come to know all too well. Also, unless the standards of physical fitness for law enforcement had become so lax that cripples could wear the Red, the slight wizard staggering along attached to his heavier-set partner at the shoulder was drunk out of his gourd.

The faint twitter of Gobbledygook at his back was not making his nervousness any better. The feeling of being watched by fourteen Goblin sentries on Gringott's battlements made the desolate state of Hogsmeade's High Street strangely comforting in retrospect. The sounds the creatures uttered were downright gleeful, and given the nature of Goblins, that indicated either an imminent rebellion or imminent human suffering. The market was all wrong for rebellion, so Severus's nervousness was understandable_._

All he needed was for the brightly cad streetwalker leaning against the lamppost at the mouth of a Knockturn to notice his death-grip on Svartálfar. Then he could be looking at slow death by unhygienic mob pending arrest by drunken Bully Boy Auror as Goblins watched on with unadulterated delight. He glanced up behind him. The sentry patrol had somehow instantly doubled, and there had to be another thirty of the gruesome creatures poking their heads out of various hidey-holes in the bank's monumental front face. All of them were staring down at the Commons with rapt attention.

This was exactly what he meant about life. It was karma; it had to be.

Then it happened, and Severus could only blink. There was a twinkling of light from up on the wall of the bank that neatly coincided with the lumbering Auror tripping over nothing and going down on top of his smaller companion. The Goblins burst into cheers and bursts of excited Gobbledygook over the brawl that immediately ensued between the two upstanding members of the Red.

For a brief moment, Severus's mind reeled at the thought of an inhuman being having the ability to work a wand adeptly enough to execute a tripping hex from over thirty yards. Then he turned to practical matters and decided that stopping to think about it wasn't worth dying over. He grabbed his change from the floo mantle, moved his grip on Svartálfar to a more friendly-looking spot on the boy's far shoulder, and left while he could.

His decision of Diagon or Knockturn was made for him by the escalating brawl, which lay almost directly between him and the dark side alley's entrance. The Leaky Cauldron it was. And if a few silent cleaning and cheering charms happened to hit the boy as they moved down Diagon, who in his right mind was going to begrudge a Slytherin his attempts at self-preservation.

XXX

Up on the battlements a Gringotts—a place very few humans could claim to have been and fewer could claim to have not been pitched off of—Bill Weasley watched in a stupor as his old Potions professor made his way down Diagon, small child in tow. He really needed to cancel the eagle eye charm, but being struck dumb was making that rather difficult. Then a Goblin clapped him soundly on the back, and he came back to reality very quickly in order to catch himself on the shallow stone barrier between him and sixty feet of free fall. He immediately cancelled the charm, returning his sight to a state where he could see things less then twenty feet away from his face, and moved away from the edge of the wall. He took the ribbing of clumsiness from the Goblins, accepted a pint mug from the stoutest in his group, Beak-something, and took a seat at the fire.

Frankly, when Bill had worked up the nerve to ask one of the bank managers for a raise and was told it could be his should he pass a test and entertain the Goblins, this was the last thing he had expected. Labyrinths, yes. Getting locked in an arena with a dragon. Rodents of unusual size!

He had never guessed he would be playing random pranks on passerby and giggling over it with Goblins like little boys in a tree fort. And he would have never, ever, ever thought he'd see his Potions NEWT nightmare walking by with a an arm slung around a little boy every bit as pale as dark-haired as him. It…

Bill gulped down the pint, and if the Goblins had done something to the drink he was already too gone to notice.

XXX

Mercies of mercies, when Severus quietly asked Tom the Barkeep for lodgings for the night, Svartálfar was doped just enough on cheering charms to smile shyly and not edge away from him but also sober enough to not grin like a bespelled loon. Still he was expecting trouble. He just didn't dream it would crop up in its chosen form. The hunched wizard took one look at Svartálfar and assumed the boy was his _son._

The term, he believed, was poleaxed. Unable to speak, he had the room key in hand and was heading for the back of the tavern with the boy before he brain could even begin to contemplate the sheer absurdity of himself with a child. At the base of the stair that led to the lodgings up above, he decided he didn't know whether to be relieved or affronted by the assumption. Yes, he supposed there was a more-than-passing resemblance to him in coloring and thinness, but the same could be said of him and the Dark Lord or even Harry Potter.

He froze momentarily halfway up the stair.

Both of which were wholly sickening and horrifying thoughts that would haunt him to his death.

XXX

XXXXX

XXX

_Heading this off, NO, Fen is not Severus' son or brother or even half-nephew. Nor does the possibility keep coming up _just_ because I want to see how many Weasleys I can drive off the deep end at the mere thought of the man reproducing. It's the coloring that's the same, and there __is__ a reason for that, one which I will get to sometime in the year 2012 at the rate I'm moving this story along. But hey, no new OCs were introduced. And considering the first draft of this chapter, you all should be _seriously_ proud of me for that. _


End file.
